Abstract
Pulsed power accelerators compress electrical energy in space and time to provide versatile experimental platforms for high energy density and inertial confinement fusion science. The 80-TW “Z” pulsed power facility at Sandia National Laboratories is the largest pulsed power device in the world today. Z discharges up to 22 MJ of energy stored in its capacitor banks into a current pulse that rises in 100 ns and peaks at a current as high as 30 MA in low-inductance cylindrical targets. Considerable progress has been made over the past 15 years in the use of pulsed power as a precision scientific tool. This paper reviews developments at Sandia in inertial confinement fusion, dynamic materials science, x-ray radiation science, and pulsed power engineering, with an emphasis on progress since a previous review of research on Z in Physics of Plasmas in 2005.
Highlights
This paper reviews the remarkable progress in high-current pulsed power research at Sandia National Laboratories over the past 15 years
Z is used for a wide range of high energy density (HED) physics experiments spanning radiation source development, radiation-driven science, dynamic material properties, magneto-inertial fusion (MIF), and inertial confinement fusion (ICF)
When Z was converted to a zpinch facility in 1996, nearly 100% of the shots used wire arrays of one form or another; these shots were intended to build upon the success of breakthrough experiments on the Saturn facility[16,17] and, in this respect, Z was highly successful.[18]
Summary
This paper reviews the remarkable progress in high-current pulsed power research at Sandia National Laboratories over the past 15 years. In 1996 PBFA-II was converted to Z to demonstrate the scaling of z-pinch radiation sources, resulting in -record soft x-ray outputs from pulsed power ($2 MJ and 200 TW).[18] In the late 1990s, Sandia scientists began using the extreme magnetic pressures on Z to compress matter directly to the 1–5 Mbar range as a dynamic material platform and using Z’s powerful radiation sources to drive additional experiments located around the x-ray sources. The pulsed power components of Z were refurbished to double the stored energy, new record facility outputs in radiation sources were achieved (2.6 MJ and 330 TW of soft x rays; >10 cal/cm[2] at 10 keV), improved materials research platforms were developed to enable increasingly sophisticated measurements at facility record pressures (>40 km/s flyer plates, up to 10 Mbar in mm-scale samples), and a major shift occurred with an emphasis on direct drive ICF rather than indirect drive (i.e., radiation-driven) ICF. Scientists today are looking at the opportunities that may be present on nextgeneration laboratory pulsed power facilities, which are briefly discussed here
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