Speaker
A. Y. Grabovskiy
Description
See the full Abstract at http://ocs.ciemat.es/EPS2018ABS/pdf/P2.3003.pdf
Cs-Ba Switching Devices for Efficient Current Management Using Plasma
Instabilities
A.S. Mustafaev1, B.D. Klimenkov1, A.Y. Grabovskiy1, V.I. Kuznetsov2
1
St. Petersburg Mining University, St. Petersburg, Russia
2
Ioffe Institute RAS, St. Petersburg, Russia
At present, the problems of current control in the electrical circuits of space nuclear
power plants are topical. Effective radiation-resistant electronic switching devices, thermionic
converters, current and voltage stabilizers, transformers, generators are needed. To solve this
problem it is possible to use radiation-resistant electronics based on a strongly nonequilibrium
anisotropic plasma. Thus in this work, we have investigated electrokinetic parameters of
diode and triode switching devices with cesium-barium filling, the following results were
obtained:
Diode device:
- the possibility of controlling the current modulation by means of an auxiliary discharge,
as well as external electric and magnetic fields has been founded;
- it has been established, that full current modulation at an ignition voltage of 5…6 V and a
discharge current density of ~10 A/cm2 can be implemented due to the development of
Bursian-Pierce plasma instability [1] and the formation of nonlinear structures in the
plasma.
Triode device:
- it has been established, that mechanism of discharge extinction using fine-mesh grid, as
well as the mechanism of spontaneous breakage, is associated with nonlinear oscillations
in the Knudsen plasma;
- stable modulation at frequencies of 1-10 kHz of specific electric power of 5 kW/cm2 and
an efficiency of more than 95% was obtained at the anode voltage 50 V;
- the use of fine-mesh grid as a control electrode provides high power in the range of
cesium vapor pressures of 10-4-10-2 Torr and low voltage losses in the open state of 0.8-
2.5 V.
References
[1] Ender A.Ya., Kuznetsov V.I., Schamel H., Akimov P.V. Switching of nonlinear plasma diodes. 1. Analytic
theory. Phys. Plasmas, 2004, vol. 11, no. 10, pp. 3212–3223.
