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It's useful when you have a circuit which needs a high-current burst which is powered from a low current (but high capacity) power source. One application for

by pbo 13y ago

It's useful when you have a circuit which needs a high-current burst which is powered from a low current (but high capacity) power source. One application for this is lasers. I'm part of a team that works on a converter that uses wall power as an input to continuously charge a few dozens ultracaps then empties them all at once to fire very short pulses in the hundreds of kW. What I find the most impressive about this is that the mechanical engineers have managed to fit this in a 2U rack.

xxpor 13y ago
Holy crap, what can you do with kW lasers besides instantly cut almost anything?
- roc 13y ago
  Popcorn?
- aidenn0 13y ago
  kW isn't that high for pulsed lasers. Particularly since with Q-switching you can get very short pulses and mode-locking ridiculously short pulses. Total energy for a 1ps pulse at 100kW is negligible.
  - acomar 13y ago
    You get some nasty ionization effects with shorter pulses, right? I did some work trying to model a fs pulse laser in college.
  - pbo 13y ago
    Exactly. Since the output is not continuous, the average power remains quite low. This is why you can still power it from regular domestic power :)