Currently in Korea, the simple catenary type overhead contact line system is being applied to both conventional lines and high speed lines of electric railway, and circulation current flowing into the catenary system frequently bring undesirable consequences. Namely, the connector wire has many problems according to a flow of excessive circulation current and arc current on catenary when an electric train runs at high speed. This paper presents the development and application of a real-time data acquisition system designed to measure the electrical characteristics of an overhead catenary system in electric railways. The developed system is capable of storing data of a 25 kV power source in a live wire state through a telemetry environment. The field test results show that the proposed technique and the developed system can be practically applied to measure characteristics of current of an overhead catenary system.

The conducting current of non-uniform plasma immersed electrode consists of ion current and secondary electron emission current caused by the impinging ion current. The ion current is determined by the ion dose passing through the sheath in front of electrode and the ion distribution in front of the electrode plays an important role in the secondary electron emission. The investigation of the distributed plasma and secondary electron effect on electrode ion current was carried out as the stainless steel electrode plugged with quartz tube was immersed in the inductively coupled Ar plasma using the antenna powered by 1 kw and the density profile was measured. After that, the negative voltage was applied by 1 kV∼6 kV to measure the conduction current for the analysis of ion current.

We have proposed a new configuration on the cathode structure to improve a neutron yield without the application of external ion sources in an inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) device. A neutron yield in the IEC device is closely related to the potential well structure generated inside the cathode and is proportional to the ion current. Therefore, the application of a double grid cathode structure to the IEC device is expected to produce a higher ion current and neutron yield than at a single grid cathode due to a high electric field strength generated around the cathode. These possibilities were verified as compared with the ion current calculated from both shape of the single and double grid cathode. Additionally from the results of ion`s lives and trajectories examined at various outer cathode voltages and grid cathode configurations by using particle simulations, the validity of the double grid cathode was confirmed.