Design and Development of a Portable High Voltage Variable Pulsed Power Source using Flyback Converter and Rotary Spark Gap from a 12V Battery

Environmental, medical and several other applications use non-thermal plasma (NTP) as a medium for sterilization’ gas cleaning, water treatment, etc. This technology which is in the budding stage in a few domains has the advantage of operating at ambient atmospheric conditions with high efficiency. High voltages are used for initiating and sustaining such plasma conditions in closed reactors and it has been observed that pulsed high voltage power enables better plasma characteristics. A portable high voltage variable pulsed power source fed from a 12V battery is designed and fabricated for non-thermal plasma generation in this work. A modified rotary spark gap (RSG) arrangement was designed and developed for converting high voltage DC into pulsed waveforms. Control techniques were implemented to attain varying pulse amplitudes and repetition rates. High voltage pulse wave shapes were obtained and compared with the conventional RSG outputs. The pulsed power source was found to be robust and economical for use in small and medium scale low power non-thermal plasma devices.