The research of dependency between trigger condition and trigger geometry for triggered vacuum switch

The triggered vacuum switch (TVS) discharges high current through two processes. In the first process, an igniting plasma is generated at a trigger system, and the next process that a main discharge is taken place sequentially at a six-gap rod electrode within a few microsecond. In general, a triggered voltage producing the igniting plasma is increased. However, after several hundred shots, it goes down and stable, in our experiment the trigger voltage is about 5 kV after 250 shots. This triggered characteristics comes from the ceramic insulator which is covered by an electrode material, therefore we have focused on the first igniting plasma process. The igniting plasma has been generated at the surface of a ceramic insulator under a strong electric field. The electric field can be increased through modifying geometries of trigger components which compose of a trigger pin, a ceramic insulator and an enclosed holder. We fabricated not only two types of trigger pin which are a plane head and an umbrella head type, but two different holders which are a concave and a convex type. In this paper the result that the dependency of geometries for these four combined types is included, but the study of the ceramic insulator is not. The research of the ceramic insulator will be announced in the other paper.