IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 45, NO.

1, JANUARY 2009 237

Inductive Pulsed-Power Supply With Marx Generator Methodology

Y. Aso1 , T. Hashimoto1 , T. Abe1 , and S. Yamada2

Ordnance Engineering Department, The Japan Steel Works, Ltd., Hiroshima 736-8602, Japan
National Institute for Fusion Science, Gifu 509-5292, Japan

We have been developing an inductive pulsed-power supply consisting of many coils with Marx Generator methodology. A Marx
Generator is charged in a parallel connection of capacitors and discharged in a series connection to obtain a high-voltage impulse. In
contrast, this inductive pulsed-power supply is excited in a series connection of coils and discharged in the parallel connection to obtain
a pulsed large electric current. Our preliminary experiment showed that this process was correct. As the next step, we have developed
a prototype of the inductive pulsed-power supply, which we call the Current Multiplier by Inductive Storage (CMIS). Here we describe
the CMIS characteristics and the results of experiments using CMIS.
Index Terms—Inductive storage, Marx generator, pulsed current, pulsed power.

I. INTRODUCTION

A N important problem in designing inductive storage for

pulsed-power supplies is in the difficulty of developing an
opening switch to commutate the large electric current [1]. One
possible way to alleviate this problem is to reduce the storage
current without changing the magnitude of the output current,
which has been demonstrated by parallel operation of six normal
conducting storage inductors [1] and parallel operation of six su-
perconducting storage inductors [2]. Another solution is to use a
step-down transformer. In this case, however, another problem
occurs, which is that the load voltage on the secondary side
moves to the primary side with the multiplied voltage by the
winding ratio of the transformer, and as a result it becomes dif-
ficult to open the circuit. We found that this problem could be
solved by switching the transformer winding [3]. In this way we
could prepare many coils that work sequentially to output a cur-
rent. First would be the primary coil of the transformer, followed
by the energy storage coil, and last would be the secondary coil
of the transformer.
The inductive pulsed-power supply being developed in JSW
consists of many coils [3], which generate the pulsed current
by applying the methodology of the Marx Generator. A Marx
Generator is charged via the parallel connection of capacitors
and discharged in a series connection to obtain a high-voltage
impulse. In contrast, the inductive pulsed-power supply being
developed in JSW is excited via the series connection of coils
and discharged via the parallel connection to obtain the pulsed
electric current multiplied to the excitation current by a number
of coils, so we call this inductive pulsed-power supply the Cur-
rent Multiplier by Inductive Storage (CMIS).
Here we show the characteristics of CMIS by describing the
characteristics of a circuit, the simulation of a circuit, and the
experimental results.
Manuscript received September 26, 2008.Current version published January
30, 2009. Corresponding author: Y. Aso (e-mail: yoshiyuki_aso@hiro.jsw.co.
jp).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMAG.2008.2008686
0018-9464/$25.00 © 2009 IEEE
Fig. 1. Sequence to generate the inductive current pulse, where PS is power
supply, Iin is excitation current, Iout is output current, and N is number of coils.
II. PRINCIPLE OF THE GENERATION OF CURRENT PULSE
The sequential performance generating the inductive pulsed
current by CMIS is shown in Fig. 1. In the excitation phase, all
coils are connected in series to the power supply (PS), so the
current of each coil is equal to that of the other coils. Through
the conserving phase, in which the magnetic flux is conserved
by connecting to the terminal of each coil, the output current
multiplied by a number of coils can be obtained in the output
phase in which all coils are connected in parallel. The correct-
ness of this process had been confirmed experimentally [3]. The
circuit calculation with a simple model is shown in Fig. 2. The
calculation is for two coils, and the each branch circuit consists
of the series connection of an inductance and a resistance. The
power supply is put to use by applying the initial condition that
a constant current is flowing through the branch circuit of No.
9. The initial current almost flows through the inductive storage
coils of the branch circuits of No. 3, 5, and 7, because the re-
sistances of these branch circuits are made much smaller than
those of the other branch circuits. The conserving phase in cal-
culation is taken into account by conserving magnetic flux. The
output phase can be obtained by opening two switches, S1 and
S2. In this calculation, the mutual inductance between two coils
is also taken into account.

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238
Fig. 2. Calculation model, where S1 and S2 are switches to connect coils in
series, and the uncolored circles with numbers represent the series connection
of an inductance and a resistance. The circles with numbers 3 and 7 indicate the
inductive storage coils, and circle number 1 is the load.
Fig. 3. Calculation result.
The calculation result is shown in Fig. 3. At 50 s, switches
S1 and S2 are opened with gradually increasing resistances to
avoid a divergence of calculation. Then, the excitation current
of No. 9 is reduced, and the currents of inductive storage coils
No. 3 and 7 are commutated into the load of branch circuit No. 1,
and as a result the load current becomes twice the strength of the
excitation currents of No. 3 and 7. The energy dissipation during
the switch can be reduced by decreasing the switching time. The
use of switching semiconductors is effective for decreasing the
switching time.
With CMIS, the current duty of each coil circuit is the same
through the three phases, and the coil current can be reduced in
inverse proportion to the number of coils, which may solve the
crucial problem of the current inductive storage system.
III. EXPERIMENT
A current inductive storage system generally needs one
storage inductor, while many storage coils are needed in CMIS.
The inductance of each coil is chosen by the output pulse width.
The number of coils is determined by the ratio of the output
current to the excitation current. In the principle verification
experiment [3], a ferrite core had been used to gain large
inductance. However, to get a large current a coreless coil must
be used. In this experiment we used a multi-turns coreless coil
to demonstrate the inductive pulsed-power supply of CMIS.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 45, NO. 1, JANUARY 2009
Fig. 4. Design of toroidal storage coil.
A. Experimental Setup
We used a toroidal type of storage coil to reduce the leakage
magnetic flux and to downsize the storage coil. The current mul-
tiplication rate of 12 was selected to make the excitation current
increase by more than one order. The parameters of the toroidal
coil were as follows: number of coil elements: 12, major radius:
105 mm, minor radius: 60 mm, height of coil: 500 mm, number
of turns: 250 turns for the main coil, 150 turns for sub coils, di-
ameter of copper wire: 2 mm, inductance: 10 mH, time constant:
20 ms, where the sub coil is prepared to make the rate of space
utilization improve, and a set of main and sub coils forms one
unit in the series connection. The design of the toroidal storage
coil is shown in Fig. 4. Using this storage coil, the system will
be expected to generate a maximum output current of 1.2 kA
from an excitation current of 100 A.
The toroidal storage coil is under construction, as shown in
Figs. 5 and 6. At first, the switching between series and parallel
connections of coils had been realized mechanically by rotating
the toroidal coil. Therefore, the coils were collocated around the
ASO et al.: INDUCTIVE PULSED-POWER SUPPLY WITH MARX GENERATOR METHODOLOGY
Fig. 5. Main (lower) and sub (upper) coils, 12 sets of which form the toroidal
coil.
Fig. 6. Toroidal coil for inductive storage.
rotating axis, as shown in Fig. 6. At present, however, the series
and parallel connections are switched statically using power de-
vices, which became possible by the multi-turns coil with larger
inductance. Using the power devices, the sequence to generate
the inductive pulsed current shown in Fig. 1 can be actualized
with the circuit as shown in Fig. 7. The IGBTs with Arabic nu-
merals in Fig. 7 indicate the series connection of coils, and the
IGBTs with Roman numerals indicate the parallel connection to
output the current. The timing from series to parallel has to be
made to overlap so it can exceed the turn-on and turn-off times
of the IGBTs. This overlap time corresponds to the conserving
phase in Fig. 1. By using the power device the energy loss during
overlap time can be neglected because of the short time of sev-
eral microseconds.
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239
Fig. 7. CMIS circuit using the power devices, where PS is power supply to
excite the storage coils.
Fig. 8. Excitation current and output current.
When the state of circuit switches from the output phase to the
excitation phase, the energy stored in the load circuit is almost
recovered to the storage coils by the large inductance ratio of the
storage coil to the load circuit. The residual energy in the load
circuit is dissipated in the circuit itself through the freewheel
diodes.
B. Experimental Result
Although twelve coils were prepared in this experiment, three
coils have been used here to demonstrate the control by power
devices. These coils are excited by the maximum current of 2 A.
The IGBTs with Roman numerals in Fig. 7 were replaced by
thyristors, based on the results of the preliminary experiment.
The gate trigger of the thyristors was synchronized to the trigger
of IGBTs. A pulsed current was outputted to a resistance load
of 0.1 ohm. The result is shown in Fig. 8. The excitation current
builds up to 2 A during the IGBT on time of 30 ms, and then the
output current of 6 A rises suddenly at the start of the on time of
the thyristors and decays with the characteristic time of about
20 ms during the 30-ms on time of the thyristors. The output
current of 6 A is equal to the value of the excitation current, 2 A,
multiplied by the number of coils, 3, which shows that each coil
is switched from the series connection in the excitation phase
to the parallel connection in the output phase and vice versa. In
Fig. 8, such a pulse is observed to be stable and continuous.
IV. DISCUSSION
In this experiment, only three coils of twelve were used to
demonstrate the circuit control by power devices, and based on
the results all coils will be used to increase the output current.
240
Moreover, the excitation current will also be increased. In prac-
tical applications that need a large current pulse, many coils
will be needed. To generate the pulsed current of MA class in
this method, several hundred coils will have to be used, because
the maximum current of an IGBT is several kA in the present
technology on a commercial basis. The use of power devices
will make the simultaneous switching of several hundred coils
possible.
On the other hand, the number of coils can be decreased by
increasing the excitation current with the parallel operation of
IGBTs, the rapid excitation of coils by means of the capacitor
discharge and the high-voltage cell, and so on. The protection
circuits for power devices become important in increasing the
current, although these circuits are not marked in the CMIS
circuit shown in Fig. 7. The rapid excitation becomes difficult
with the increase of coils, which may be avoided by separately
charging the segmented coils with multiple power supplies.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 45, NO. 1, JANUARY 2009
V. CONCLUSION
A pulsed current could be generated by switching three coils
in series and parallel connections. The switching by power de-
vices made the generation of stable and continuous pulses pos-
sible, which pioneers the way to building systems that use sev-
eral hundred coils.
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