Study on the characteristics of the gas switch electrode erosion

Gas spark switch is one of the key parts in pulsed power technology. Electrode erosion has great influence on the switch performance and lifetime. In this paper, a field distortion gas switch is selected for the experiment and a great deal of discharging experiments have been conducted in different test conditions. The forming process of etch pit as well as its influencing factors is discussed briefly and surface roughness coefficient (SRC) of the electrode is put forward to evaluate the state of electrode erosion. Experimental results show that current peak plays an important role in electrode erosion when waveforms of discharge current are the same, and electric charge and oscillation frequency of discharge current also have great effect on the electrode erosion when waveforms of discharge current are different. With the increase of discharge times, SRC decreases slowly at first and then decreases quickly after three thousand of discharge times.