Pulsed Power and Power Conditioning Capacitors

A capacitor development effort focused on capacitors used in pulsed power and power conversion applications underwent at General Atomics Electronic Systems Inc. (GA-ESI) for decades. In recent years, funding for these efforts has accelerated the rate of development progress to the point where the time it takes to decrease the size of a capacitor by half has dropped from 10 years to 4 years. This progress made in pulsed power and power conversion capacitors will be described along with the performance characteristics of today’s capacitors.