A typical batch treatment system consists of a high-voltage pulse generator and a treatment chamber. Other auxiliary devices may also be used for degassing, vacuuming, preheating, and cooling of the treatment medium. To generate an exponential decay pulse from a conventional high voltage DC power supply, a resistor–capacitor circuit is usually used with a rotational spark gap (
Sato et al., 1994;
Mizuno and Hori, 1988) or with a mercury ignitron spark gap (
Zhang et al., 1994a). A three-stage Marx bank was designed (
Gupta and Murray, 1990), which was immersed ...