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Who are we?
Pulsed Power Conferences,
Inc. (PPC Inc.) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit scientific and educational
organization seeking to support the dissemination of research in the pulsed
power community. PPC Inc. was responsible for the first 10 Pulsed Power
Conferences that were held in cooperation with the IEEE. Subsequent Pulsed
Power Conferences were sponsored by the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma
Sciences Society's Pulsed Power Science and Technology Standing Committee.
Our current Board of Directors.
Our History
The first and
second Pulsed Power Conferences were held in Lubbock, Texas
in 1976 and 1979, respectively. Lubbock was
selected as the venue because of the concentration of pulsed power activity
at Texas Tech University.
Subsequent Pulsed Power Conferences were organized biennially in odd years,
hosted in a city with significant pulsed power research activities. The
Pulsed Power Conference has become the principal medium for communicating
advances in pulsed power science, technology and applications. The
Conference Proceedings, published for every conference, constitute the most
complete record of the accomplishments of the pulsed power community over
the last quarter of the previous century continuing through the new
millenium. Through 1995 the Pulse Power Conference was affiliated with the
IEEE and sponsored by Pulsed Power Conferences, Inc. (a private,
not-for-profit scientific and educational organization). Since 1997 the
conference has been organized by the IEEE Pulsed Power Science and
Technology Committee (PPS&T) of the Nuclear and Plasma Sciences
Society. In 2001, the Pulsed Power Conference was combined for the first
time with the International Conference for Plasma Science, a successful
experiment that will be repeated in 2007. Although the Pulsed Power
Conference is now an official IEEE conference, Pulsed Power Conferences,
Inc. still supports the conference by co-sponsoring student awards, and
helping to financially support the conference through grants.
What is Pulsed
Power?
Modern pulsed power has its genesis in the pioneering work of the late John
Christopher Martin and his colleagues at the Atomic Weapons Establishment
in Aldermaston, England in the 1960's.
"Charlie," as he was known to the community, was a
hydrodynamicist who could not purchase an adequate x-ray radiography source
to image the dynamic phenomena he was interested in. As a result he pursued
a new generation of radiography sources that were based on high power Marx
generators, coupled with low impedance transmission lines, and cold cathode
single-stage accelerating gaps. Thus was the birth of modern pulsed power.
Pulsed power science
and technology rapidly disseminated to the U.S.,
former Soviet Union and the present-day Russia,
Europe and Asia. Pulsed power refers to
the technology whereby energy is accumulated over a relatively long period
of time, and then compressed in a short period of time to deliver very large
power pulses to a given load. In this regard, pulsed power is an enabling
technology, that is, its development has been spawned by some application
(the "load") that requires a very large power pulse for a
relatively short period of time. Typical loads historically have included
particle beam diodes, imploding plasmas, and other primarily
defense-related applications; today, however, the loads can be biological
samples, water from municipal drinking supplies, effluents from combustion
processes, among other environmental and biomedical applications. In short,
pulsed power has evolved to not only play an important role in defense,
including homeland defense, but has evolved to become an important
technology in the environmental and biomedical arenas as well.
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