Experimental study on the influence of thermal accumulation on breakdown in slow-wave structures

Abstract

Radio frequency (RF) breakdown in the slow-wave structures (SWSs) is a crucial bottleneck restricting relativistic backward wave oscillator (RBWO) to pursuing higher output power and longer pulse width. This paper has experimentally studied the influence of thermal accumulation during repetitive operation on RF breakdown in an X-band RBWO. A method for cooling the SWSs using water flow has been proposed to restrain the temperature rise to some extent. Under different heat dissipation conditions, the operating states of the RBWOs exhibit great differences. The greater the distance between the water-cooling heat transfer channel and the SWSs, the more serious the pulse shortening of high-power microwave. Moreover, the breakdown traces appearing in the SWSs become more obvious with the worse convective heat transfer capacity. The observed experimental phenomena provide a new guideline that helps to enrich the mechanism of RF breakdown and to explore corresponding suppression methods in RBWO.