In this paper, we investigate the self-pulsing phenomenon of cavity discharge in a cylindrical hollow cathode in various gases including argon, helium, nitrogen, oxygen, and air. The current-voltage characteristics of the cavity discharge, the waveforms of the self-pulsing current and voltage as well as the repetition frequency were measured. The results show that the pulsing frequency ranges from a few to tens kilohertz and depends on the averaged current and the pressure in all gases. The pulsing frequency will increase with the averaged current and decrease with the pressure. The rising time of the current pulse is nearly constant in a given gas or mixture. The self-pulsing does not depend on the external ballast but is affected significantly by the external capacitor in parallel with the discharge cell. The low-current self-pulsing in hollow cathode discharge is the mode transition between Townsend and glow discharges. It can be described by the charging-discharging process of an equivalent circuit consisting of capacitors and resistors.

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This paper presents a new approach and corresponding experiments for the nonlinear robust control of a superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) unit to improve the transient stability of power systems. Based on the result of SMES prototype experience, a new dynamic model with disturbances of SMES is adopted, and transferred to the per unit system for simplifying the dynamic analysis and controller design. Then, feedback linearization scheme and linear control theory are applied to design a novel SMES nonlinear robust controller in a one-machine infinite bus (OMIB) power system. In order to confirm such positive effects of the proposed control strategy, experiments are carried on a laboratory setup of SMES comparing that with a conventional proportional-integral (PI) controller. The results of experiments demonstrate that the proposed nonlinear robust controller has more excellent performance to improve the transient stability of power systems than that of conventional PI controllers.Index Terms-Nonlinear robust control, power system control, power system transient stability, superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES).

In this paper, a two-dimensional fluid model was developed to study the radio frequency (RF) hollow cathode discharge (HCD) in argon at 1 Torr. The evolutions of the particle density distribution and the ionization rate distribution in RF HCD at 13.56 MHz indicate that the discharge mainly occurs inside the hollow cathode. The spatio-temporal distributions of the ionization rate and the power deposition within the hollow cathode imply that sheath oscillation heating is the primary mechanism to sustain the RF HCD, whereas secondary electron emission plays a negligible role. However, as driving frequency decreases, secondary electron heating becomes a dominant mechanism to sustain the discharge in RF hollow cathode.

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