Implementation of the ACE 4 plasma opening switch on the Decade Quad

Abstract

Summary form only given, as follows. This paper reports on the initial implementation of a monolithic plasma opening switch (MPOS) on the Decade Quad (DQ). The recent installation of a water convolute combining the power flow from the four DQ modules to drive a plasma radiation source (PRS) enables a MPOS configuration for driving a bremsstrahlung radiation source (BRS). The conduction phase requirement for the DQ MPOS is roughly 8 MA for 300 ns. Numerical simulations and experimental results on ACE 4 suggest that the dominate parameter controlling the POS operation is the conduction phase I*T product. The ACE 4 POS design, characterized at an I*T product of 2.4 MA-/spl mu/s, was installed and tested on the water-convoluted DQ configuration. The work reported here will contrast the observed performance of the unoptimized ACE 4 POS on DQ with that expected based on scaling from ACE 4. Optimization of the DQ monolithic POS is planned for a later phase of the present work.