Performance Enhancements for Compact Marx Generators

As research on high-power radio frequency systems has become focused on compact systems for deployable directed energy applications, compact Marx generators have become a common modulator technology for these systems. Despite this popularity, the engineering of compact Marx generators is still somewhat of an art. An analysis of the various stray capacitance for the general characteristics of a Platts (wave erection) Marx, a PFN-Marx, and a compact high-energy Marx is performed to examine the effect on the erection process and mitigations are evaluated. The analysis reveals that stray capacitance effects are dependent on the number of stages and stage geometry. Moreover, the increase in output voltage with the number of stages is a function of the stray capacitance normalized to the stage capacitance. A successful compact Marx design will exhibit good erection performance while also addressing the engineering tradeoffs to optimize a design for a particular application.