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Registered Member #135
Joined: Sat Feb 11 2006, 12:06AM
Location: Anywhere is fine
Posts: 1735
Mica caps are used for HV decoupling of RF sources, they do not make good pulse caps.
When pushed to the limit of their energy density handling the Mica burns through and shorts, destroying your charging supply.
I know this because I was using my Mica caps for pulse duty and they killed my transformer. They work for low power up to that self destruct limit, then all bets are off.
You ought to get some rugged CDE film caps or PIO caps for the job. My Quantel laser source does use a couple of banks of WIMA poly pro. caps for energy discharge, but other then that I would say forget about Mica, Mylar, or anything else that does not specifically call out for Energy Discharge on the can.
Registered Member #543
Joined: Tue Feb 20 2007, 04:26PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4992
Surely you should always work backwards from the application to the choice of capacitor?
For example, some capacitors in pulse service need have a working lifetime of only one single charge and discharge cycle - slapper capacitors for example.
The capacitors in very big Marxes will often last only ten or twenty shots before they need to be replaced at a cost of thousands of dollars each.
Registered Member #152
Joined: Sun Feb 12 2006, 03:36PM
Location: Czech Rep.
Posts: 3384
mobilechernobyl wrote ...
My goal right now is for between 4-5KV and 1-5uF.
Then your best bet would be a couple of high voltage caps from microwave ovens. They can be gotten for free or cheaply, and are about 0.6-1.4uF each and will happily take 6kV DC. They can also take quite some abuse, such as direct hard shorts.
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Identifying HV Pulse Caps
