Pulsed Power Systems: Principles and Applications

This scholarly work has a good balance of the essentials of pulsed power components and techniques against applications and possible uses of this technology. 99 % of the material on pulsed power subjects is only available in I.E.E.E. Journal and proceedings, with some spill over into the internet as Phd. work. A lot of the technology had been locked in companies like Physics international, Maxwell Labs. Etc. that had to change their direction when the Berlin wall came down because there was no longer a need for high power flash X-ray machines to simulate nuclear weapons effects.

Good

This text is a great ground-up review of pulsed power technology. The text starts with a unified survey (~40 pages) of dielectric breakdown (gas, liquid, solid) in chapter 2, and continues with a brief review of energy storage capacitors, Marx banks, basic inductive pulsers, and rotating machines in chapter 3. Next, the author covers quite a wide variety of opening and closing switching technologies. The author continues with fundamental info on PFNs, MITLs, and brief info on pulse transformers and HV switchmode power supplies. There's a chapter on power and voltage adding, one on diagnostics, and one on typical large pulsed power systems (e.g., Z and Hermes III). I enjoyed the topic of cumulative pulse lines, which I'd never heard of before. I didn't find the final three chapters too useful, which are on commercial and industrial applications, but they may be of interest to you.This book is quite expensive, but it fills in a lot of practical gaps that P. W. Smith does not cover in his book Transient Electronics, e.g., breakdown, switching, and diagnostics. Smith does, however, cover the topic of pulse generation in greater detail. The information in this book is better organzied and better presented than in Pai and Zhang's Introduction to High Power Pulse Technology, although the latter is so cheap you might as well own a copy. The literature references at the end of the chapters are quite useful (e.g., G. A. Mesyats cites a lot of Russian literature in his book that is not easily available) but they are not any better than Smith's.The disk included with the book includes a transmission line simulation code LEITER which I found a little hard to use.My only qualm with this book is the price, really I'm not sure there is any justification for the high price except that it's a good book in a field that doesn't have many (any?) good intro/survey texts. Get your company or your professor to purchase I copy. Overall, highly recommended.