An 85‐kJ high performance capacitor bank with double‐mode trigatrons

The present article describes the constructional aspects of an 85‐kJ capacitor bank at 20 kV for the production of pulsed high magnetic fields. The discharge current magnitude is 56 kA at a ringing frequency of 1.1 kHz. The bank employs 8 double‐mode trigatrons in parallel which are triggered into conduction by the application of 16 simultaneous low jitter high voltage pulses generated by a multiple trigger pulse generator. The performance of the bank with double‐mode trigatrons is compared with that obtained by conventional single‐mode trigatrons. The waveforms of discharge current in time domain and fast fourier frequency spectrum for single‐ and double‐mode trigatrons are presented and analyzed for performance evaluation. The performance with double‐mode trigatrons is characterized by distinctly superior synchronization in the closing of trigatron switches over a wide range of operating voltage resulting in high peak discharge current and low waveform distortion.