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In a wide variety of high-power pulsed devices, the megavolt switch plays a key role in the system performance. A capacitance–resistance coupling structure was designed to produce UV light which triggered the switch to decrease the breakdown jitter. High-speed electrical measurements with a circuit integrating probe in the nanosecond range were employed to measure the voltage before the switch. From the experimental results, the breakdown characteristic of a 3-MV UV-illumination switch was obtained in the range of 1.6–2.5 MV: The jitter of the breakdown voltage is lower than 25 kV, and the jitter of the breakdown time is shorter than 5 ns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much of the work in the area of surface flashover of the past few decades has been devoted into determining which parameters are important in predicting flashover behavior, and the theoretical understanding involved in the process is not yet mature. In this paper, the flashover performance of the insulator in vacuum was studied in the UV-laser-illuminated case. A testbed comprised of a pulsed high-voltage supply, a vacuum chamber, and an excimer laser was assembled to test the flashover performance under pulsed-voltage and UV-laser irradiation. Two different voltage decrease patterns were measured, implying some underlying information of the flashover mechanism. In addition, a circuit model was used to simplify the surface flashover system, and the simulation results seem pretty good with the experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]