Printed circuit board based electrically triggered compact rail gap switch

An electrically triggered rail gap switch has been designed over a commercially available copper clad fiberglass sheet commonly used in making printed circuit boards for applications requiring compact design and direct integration to parallel plate transmission lines. Switch performance has been investigated in terms of its inductance, jitter, and gap closing time. With an electrode separation of 9.0 mm, it has been found to have an inductance of 6 nH, gap closing time of 5 ns, and jitter of about 4-10 ns measured at 95% of self-breakdown voltage. An application of this switch has been demonstrated as an electrically exploding foil accelerator developed over the same board and velocities up to 1.6 km/s have been achieved on Kapton flyers with diameter of 3.0 mm and thickness of 125 mu m using a compact 1 mu F capacitor bank. (c) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3429945]