Progress and testing of PPD in later half of 2019

Improvements of design and setup of the PPD

The PPD was moved to the new room (see figure 1). This required disassembling and reassembling
everything, so I took the opportunity to also improve the design of the setup in various ways:

 Since there was a problem with the connector for the dummy coil coming loose due to the
motion of the coil during the discharge, I designed a sturdier version (see figure 1). The cable is
clamped in place, and the coil mounted to a wooden pallet to avoid any motion that might put
tension on the connectors.
 Improved the mounting of the thyratron and replaced most of the cables with solid copper
busbar. Added 19” rack frame to mount the thyratron trigger box, voltage probe, HV relays etc.
Improved mounting of the dump resistors. Figure 2 shows the setup before and after these
improvements.
 Control: Previously, the controls for the triggering and the charging/discharging relays was done
manually, and this was changed to be done remotely instead (using a Raspberry Pi and Arduino).
This also made it possible to set and read the charging voltage of the power supply using a
computer, which is essential when operating the PPD remotely. The control setup worked well
enough for simple testing, but is not reliable enough for an experiment (had e.g. some issues
with the program crashing after firing, and sometimes losing the network connection to the
various devices). This will be replaced with a NI controller and LabVIEW program provided by
the CS team.
 Safety: A lot of improvements were done to the safety setup. I set up a new 19” rack mounted
control box, which for example implemented a PNOZ safety relay to integrate the pressure
monitor of the capacitors, the safety interlock on the door to the PPD cage, and warning
lights/buzzer into the emergency power off (EPO) safety circuit.
Figure 1.
1: Top: the PPD
Location in the
of PPD new
(top), room.interlock
Safety Bottom:on
Safety
door,interlock on the door; connector to coil; and
dummy load mounted on a wooden pallet
Figure 2: Top: Setup of the PPD in the E3 control room. Bottom: Improved setup after
moving to the new room.
 Not yet implemented
Figure 3. Circuit diagram of the PPD. The red box shows the components not yet acquired/installed, but should be implemented
to use the system with HZDR coil.
Testing
In the beginning of last year, we tested the thyratron switch with four capacitors up to 15kV, but since
we had to interrupt the tests to move out of the E3 control room, we were not able to repeat this with
all five capacitors. Once I had everything set up in the new room, and had the safety equipment required
for the TWA sorted, I was able to start up testing again in December.

A simplified circuit diagram of the setup is shown in figure 3. The main goal of the tests where to ensure
the thyratron (HV switch) worked reliably, and to operate it with all five capacitors charged to 15kV (i.e.
30kJ). A secondary goal was to be able to control and trigger everything remotely, and to test the safety
system (lights, EPOs, door interlock etc.). These tests where all done successfully, and the results are
described below.

The testing was divided into three parts:

We first repeated the tests from earlier in the year with four capacitors. This was done by increasing the
voltage step-by-step up to a maximum of 15kV, and then repeating several shots at this voltage to
ensure that the results were consistent. The current through the coil and the voltage of the capacitors
for some of these shots are shown in figure 4. The voltage measurement clearly shows the required
reproducibility, and the current using this coil is around 30kA. While there seems to be a shot-to-shot
variation in the current, this is not actually the case, but is simply due to the unreliability of the
homemade Rogowski coil we are using. The Rogowski coil gives a voltage proportional to dI/dt, and
since it is very sensitive to noise, integrating the signal to obtain the current introduces various offsets
and errors. The calibration constant of the coil, and hence the amplitude of the current, may also have
some error. To have a more reliable measurement of the current, we should get a commercial Rogowski
coil (or current monitor), which also has the benefit of directly providing the current without having to
integrate the signal.
Figure 4. Voltage and current traces for several shots with four capacitors

The second part of the testing was to ensure that the thyratron also worked with five capacitors. This
was done in the same way as for the four capacitors by increasing the voltage step-by-step up to 15kV.
Figure 5 shows examples of the current and voltage traces for a capacitor voltage of 15kV, and using
four and five capacitors.

The last part of the testing was to make sure that the setup of the thyratron in the system had the
required symmetry of the current distribution to/from the thyratron to maximize its’ life-time. An
asymmetry can lead to the arc inside the switch not being distributed evenly, but instead occurring at
single spot, and eventually burning a hole in the side. This can reduce the lifetime of the thyratron from
hundreds of thousands of shots to only a few hundred shots. According to the manufacturer, the ideal
setup would be having the thyratron mounted directly on top of a single capacitor, or at least having our
five capacitors setup in a star shape (*) with the thyratron in the center. This would obviously not be
possible/practical in our case, but they agreed that the setup I designed should also work. To ensure the
symmetry requirements are met, the thyratron has a coaxial setup (see figure 2), where the current
from all capacitors enters/leaves the thyratron through a single connection point, and the return current
flows around it along the surrounding copper busbars.

To check that there was no asymmetry problem, I set up a camera to image the thyratron while firing.
The arc inside the thyratron could barely be seen for voltages below 12kV, and example images for
15kV, using four and five capacitors, are shown in figure 6. There is no discernible difference, between
the two, so there does not appear to be an issue with having two capacitors on one side and three on
the other. According to the manufacturer “The light should be "diffused", that is not too bright and be
seen all around the ceramic, not in one spot”. This also appears to be the case, so the setup should work
as it is.
 Figure 5. Voltage and current traces for four and five capacitors

Figure 6. Images of thyratron while using four (left), and five (right) capacitors. The anode is on the bottom, the cathode on
the top, and the vertical dark column in the center is one of the copper busbars blocking the light.