Design and Simulation of Nano-Second Pulsed Power Generator for Cancer Treatment and Considering Load Effect

Abstract

Cancer is one of the most common and severe diseases observed in clinical medicine. Cancer is always fatal if left untreated. One way to cancer treatment is to use pulsed electric fields. Today, pulse power technology is widely used in applications such as food processing, water purification, military industries, cancer treatment, gene transfer and other fields. When the pulse enters the cancer cells, irreversible electroporation occurs in them, causing cell death. The load, which is cultured cancer cells, is placed in a cuvette electrode and measured by the impedance analyser. Many efforts have been made to treat cancer using pulse power technology that in each of which the cell charge is electrically modelled in some way. An important challenge in the design of pulsed power supplies in the application of cancer treatment is the variability of load impedance. In this study, by measuring the impedance of cultured cancer cells and simulating the power supply, an attempt has been made to solve this issue. In this article a nanosecond Marx generator was used on the basis of crowbar switches, and the resulted pulses that obtained by impedance matching have the pulse width in the nano and microseconds ranges with the peak voltage of 4 kV. With these output conditions, the pulses are acceptable because irreversible electroporation requires a multikilovolt pulse in the nano / microsecond range.