Professional Documents
Culture Documents
This Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier was part of one of the early particle
accelerators responsible for development of the atomic bomb. Built in 1937 by
Philips of Eindhoven it is now in the National Science Museum in London, England.
The Cockcroft-Walton (CW) generator, or multiplier, was named after the two men
who in 1932 used this circuit design to power their particle accelerator, performing
the first artificial nuclear disintegration in history. John Douglas Cockcroft and
Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton used this voltage multiplier cascade for most of their
research, which in 1951 won them the Nobel Prize in Physics for "Transmutation of
atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles". Less well known is the
fact that the circuit was discovered much earlier, in 1919, by Heinrich Greinacher, a
Swiss physicist. For this reason, this doubler cascade is sometimes also referred to as
the Greinacher multiplier.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Design
• 2 Operational characteristics
• 3 Usage
• 4 See also
• 5 Further reading
• 6 External links
[edit] Design
A full-wave CW multiplier
CW multipliers are typically used to develop higher voltages for relatively low
current applications such as bias voltages ranging from tens or hundreds of volts to
millions of volts for high-energy physics experiments or lightning safety testing.
[edit] Usage
CW multipliers are also found, with a higher number of stages, in laser systems,
high-voltage power supplies, X-ray systems, LCD backlighting, traveling wave tube
amplifiers, ion pumps, electrostatic systems, air ionisers, particle accelerators, copy
machines, scientific instrumentation, oscilloscopes, TV sets, CRT sets, bug zappers
and many other applications that use high-voltage DC.
The Greinacher doubler circuit (a) transforms a grounded AC voltage (peak voltage
Up) into symmetrical DC voltages of 1x Up each, thus producing 2x Up between
outputs. If the input voltage is already symmetrical (e.g. as in an Obit), the
Greinacher circuit may be doubled according to (b). This does not change the output
voltages but increases the possible output current by a factor of two.
Villard cascade
Cascaded
Villard
doubler
circuits. All
diodes and
caps must
be
dimensioned
for 2x Up.
For
sinusoidal
input
voltage, C1
of the first
stage may
be reduced
to 1x Up.