High Energy Density Physics Experiments Research Articles

The Atlas project-a new pulsed power facility for high energy density physics experiments

Atlas is a facility being designed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to perform high-energy-density experiments in support of weapon physics and basic research programs. It is designed to be an international user facility, providing experimental opportunities to researchers from national laboratories and academic institutions. For hydrodynamic experiments, it will be capable of achieving a pressure exceeding 30 Mbar in a several cubic centimeter volume. With the development of a suitable opening switch, it will be capable of producing more than 3 MJ of soft X-rays. The capacitor bank design consists of a 36 MJ array of 240 kV Marx modules. The system is designed to deliver a peak current of 45-50 MA with a 4-5-/spl mu/s rise time. The Marx modules are designed to be reconfigured to a 480-kV configuration for opening switch development. The capacitor bank is resistively damped to limit fault currents and capacitor voltage reversal. An experimental program for testing and certifying prototype components is currently under way. The capacitor bank design contains 300 closing switches. These switches are a modified version of a railgap switch originally designed for the DNA-ACE machines. Because of the large number of switches in the system, individual switch prefire rates must be less than 10/sup -4/ to protect the expensive target assemblies. Experiments are under way to determine if the switch-prefire probability can be reduced with rapid capacitor charging.

Results of Russian/US high-performance DEMG experiment

In November 1992, the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF), Arzamas-16, Russia and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos NM, USA embarked on a historic effort to conduct a joint explosive pulse-power experiment. With the concurrence of the Ministry of Atomic Energy (Russia) and the Department of Energy (US), the two laboratories entered into a laboratory-to-laboratory collaboration in the areas of very high-energy pulse power and ultrahigh magnetic fields in order to explore problems of mutual scientific interest. The first experiment to be planned was an explosively powered, fast, high-current pulse-power system demonstration. The experiment used a flux compressor, inductive store, and high-current opening switch to demonstrate the feasibility of supplying many megajoules of electrical energy, on microsecond time scales, to high-energy density physics experiments. The experiment was conducted in Arzamas-16 on September 22, 1993.