High Voltage Test

Well, a series of high voltage impulses is fed to the spark plug of a petrol/gasoline engine. So it shouldn't be too difficult.

YES, it is called a transformer, optimized to pulse transmission. If DC required, add a rectifier ladder. Piece of cake, if you are into particle physics, or megaVolts testing labs.

High voltage pulses for testing transformers are usually made using a Marx Generator.

Chopped waves for testing transformers are usually made using a Marx Generator and a rod gap.

You might Google transformer basic impulse level (BIL) for more information on this test.

High voltage pulses are produced by a surge tester, there are various output voltage sets available, 3kV, 12kV at 60Hz pulses for doing winding comparision "ring" tests, with a DC Hipot built in for insulation resistance testing.

As the coil size gets bigger, the pulse repitition rate decreases. I have quoted or sold up to 80kV as I recall.

The objective is to create an IEEE522 spike, when testing, the ends of the coil are swapped to get the maximum volts applied in each direction.

This can be done to compare un-assembled or assembed coils (or phases) of transformers or motors (size dependent).

Many moons ago I had to make a chopping circuit for a piezoelectric ultrasonic transducer. It was to image pulse strings of 200 KHz ultrasound before and after passing through bone in order to measure bone density and osteoporosis. I used a cmos pulse generator chip say 555 timer to switch on a gating chip through which passed the constant wave high voltage (admittedly only 50 v pp) created by an oscillator circuit. The output was a short pulse stream every second or so. However the gating circuit does produce high frequency ringing (as the pulse switches on and off) because the fourier transform of a square wave contains high frequencies. You can filter these out using an op amp low pass filter. Not sure the max voltage this would cope with but worked fine for me. may be able to get a circuit diagram if this helps.