Special Issue on Pulsed Power: Technology and Applications

Pulsed power is a technology that refers to the gradual accumulation of energy over a relatively long time scale (seconds), and its compression into very short pulses (hundreds of picoseconds to microseconds) for delivery to a “load.” Whereas typical loads over the past 40 years or so have comprised charged particle beam-producing diodes, high-power electromagnetic radiation-producing switches, or imploding plasmas for radiation production and fusion energy research, recent loads have included biological media, water from municipal drinking supplies, and effluents from combustion processes, among other environmental and biomedical applications. In short, pulsed power has evolved to not only continue to play an important role in defense, including the nascent area of threats to the civilian infrastructure, but has evolved to become an important technology in the environmental and biomedical arenas as well. We are pleased to present this Special Issue of the PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE on Pulsed Power: Technology and Applications. The only other time that Pulsed Power was featured in PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE was in a Special Section guest edited by Dr. J. P. VanDevender in 1992 [1]. The fact that the 1992 Special Section was dominated by papers featuring large, laboratory-scale pulsed power-driven experiments is representative of the scarcity of pulsed power applications outside of the defense sector at the time. The intervening dozen years has witnessed an ever-increasing list of novel applications for pulsed power technology, and this Special Issue seeks to express the breadth of pulsed power science and technology research that is ongoing internationally. This Special Issue comprises 15 papers, the first one providing background information on pulsed power technology for the nonspecialist, followed by 14 invited papers describing aspects of pulsed power technology or their specific applications. The papers are organized as follows.