High-voltage condensers in a polarity-inversion two-stage Marx surge generator are charged from -50 to -70 kV using a power supply, and the electric charges in the condensers are discharged to an x-ray tube after closing the gap switches in the surge generator using a trigger device. The x-ray tube is a demountable diode, and the turbomolecular pump evacuates air from the tube with a pressure of approximately 1 mPa. Clean copper Kα lines are produced using a 10-μm-thick nickel filter, since the tube utilizes a disk cathode and a rod target, and bremsstrahlung rays are not emitted in the opposite direction to that of electron acceleration. The peak tube voltage increased with increasing charging voltage. At a charging voltage of -70 kV, the peak tube voltage and current were 140 kV and 0.8 kA, respectively. The pulse widths were approximately 30 ns, and the maximum dimension of the x-ray source was 3.0 mm in diameter. The number of generator-produced Kα photons was approximately 2.5x10⁶ photons/cm² at 0.5 m per pulse.

Date Published: 17 March 2005
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 5580, 26th International Congress on High-Speed Photography and Photonics, (17 March 2005); doi: 10.1117/12.567585

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5580:
26th International Congress on High-Speed Photography and Photonics
Dennis L. Paisley; Stuart Kleinfelder; Donald R. Snyder; Brian J. Thompson, Editor(s)