DIRECTED ENERGY PROFESSIONAL SOCIETY
JOURNAL OF DIRECTED ENERGY

Compact Pulsed Power for Directed Energy Weapons

David Price, Carl Bloemker, Edward Goldman, David Nett, Sidney Putnam, Doug Weidenheimer, Roger White, and Tony Wynn
        Titan Corporation, 2700 Merced Street, San Leandro, California 94577

The Titan Corporation has been developing directed energy technologies since the early 1980s. Over this time Titan has provided advanced power supplies for electromagnetic gun and laser research while making broader contributions in the field of high-power microwaves (HPM). Titan’s HPM work expanded from initial efforts fielding and operating the first gigawatt-level oscillators for susceptibility test applications, to research and development maximizing the peak and average output powers and overall

efficiency realized from such systems. As interest in HPM technology has spread globally, Titan has leveraged this core competency and provided the HPM equipment for nearly all of the major European effects test facilities. Titan’s current interests focus on compact, efficient and reliable directed energy weapon systems and the advanced subsystems and components that enable the same. Specific subsystems of interest include pulse-forming networks and intermediate energy storage and power conditioning elements (electronically reconfigurable batteries and power ride-thru subsystems). These

subsystems are designed for reduced size and weight while still meeting severe service, platform integration, lifetime, and thermal management constraints. Specific components under development at Titan include laser-gated solid-state switches and both high peak and high average power, frequency-agile, HPM oscillators. Status and recent results from this research are presented.

KEYWORDS: Electronically reconfigurable batteries, High-power microwaves, Laser-gated solid-state switches, Magnetron, Power-ride thru, Pulsed power, Reltron