Wang Lingyun

Development of all-solid-state flash x-ray generator with photoconductive semiconductor switches.

A compact, low-jitter, and high repetitive rate all-solid-state flash x-ray generator making use of photo conductive semiconductor switches was developed recently for the diagnostic purpose of some hydrokinetical experiments. The generator consisted of twelve stages of Blumlein pulse forming networks, and an industrial cold cathode diode was used to generate intense x-ray radiations with photon energy up to 220 keV. Test experiments showed that the generator could produce >1 kA electron beam currents and x-ray pulses with ~40 ns duration under 100 Hz repetitive rates at least (limited by the triggering laser on hand), also found was that the delay time of the cathode explosive emission is crucial to the energy transfer efficiency of the whole system. In addition, factors affecting the diode impedance, how the switching synchronization and diode impedance determining the allowable operation voltage were discussed.

Investigation on emission characteristics of metal-ceramic cathode applied to industrial X-ray diode

The industrial x-ray diode with high impedance configuration is usually adopted to generate repetitive x-ray, but its performance would be worsened due to lower electric field on the cathode of diode when a voltage of several hundreds of kV is applied. To improve its performance, a novel metal-ceramic cathode is proposed in this paper. Key factors (width, relative permittivity of ceramic, and so on) affecting electric field distribution on triple points are analyzed by electrostatic field calculation program, so as to optimize the design of this novel cathode. Experiments are done to study the characteristics including emission current of cathode, diode voltage duration, diode mean dynamic impedance, and diode impedance drop velocity within diode power duration. The results show that metal-ceramic cathode could improve diode performance by enhancing emission current and stabling impedance; the impedance drop velocity of diode with spoke-shaped metal-ceramic cathode was reduced to -5 Ω ns(-1) within diode power duration, comparing to -15 Ω ns(-1) with metal foil cathode.