The paper details capacitor bank experiments performed to assess the performance of a plasma erosion opening switch (PEOS). A description is given of the PEOS, which was of an inexpensive and expendable design, and was intended for use as the final stage of a flux compressor output conditioning circuit. Techniques usicg automatically operating exploding foils, as both opening and closing switches, condition the 9ps quarter-wave output pulse from the capacitor bank to a 400ns pulse to the PEOS. An outline is given of the computer modelling and the experimental procedures used to establish the optimum operating conditions, and results are presented which illustrate the behaviour of the PEOS.

When a load requiring a very fast rising current is fed from a flux-compression generator, it is necessary to introduce a conditioning circuit in order to reduce the rise time of the generator output current substantially. The final stage of this circuit will include a plasma erosion opening switch, which is the fastest known opening switch for use at the current levels involved. This paper presents results obtained during the development of a novel two-stage conditioning circuit and compares the experimental performance of the circuit with results provided by a computer simulation. A time compression of the rise time of the currents from microseconds to less than 100 ns was obtained, representing a 40-fold increase in the corresponding signals.