Instabilities in foil implosions and the effect of radiation output
- and others
One of the aims of the Athena program at the Los Alamos National Laboratory is the generation of a high fluence of soft x-rays from the thermalization of an radially imploding foil. In the experiments in Athena program, a large axial current is passed through a cylindrical aluminum foil. Under the action of the Lorentz force, the resulting plasma accelerates toward the axis, thermalizes, and produces a fast soft x-ray pulse with a blackbody temperature up to several hundred electron volts. In order that there be the maximum power compression and the highest x-ray fluence and temperature, the plasma stagnation on axis must occur very promptly. This requires that the imploding plasma be as thin and symmetric as possible. A serious problem in the thermalization process is the formation of instabilities in the plasma due to the self-magnetic field that governs the implosion of foil. A large diagnostic effort was developed to capture the details of the implosion and instability growth in several foil implosion experiments. In this report, we will present visible light images and x-ray data designed to study the effects of foil mass, current, and initial perturbations on the instability growth during foil implosion. Representative data is presented from several experiments using the Pegasus capacitor bank system and the explosively driven Procyon system. These experiments are labeled Peg 25 and Peg 33 for the Pegasus experiments and PDD1, PDD2 and PRF0 for the Procyon experiments. In these experiments, all foils had radii of 5 centimeters but varied in mass and initial conditions. Experimental data from several shots were compared with each other and to a radiation magnetohydrodynamic (RMHD) computation and described in a separate paper.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-36
- OSTI ID:
- 100185
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-95-2321; CONF-950750-6; ON: DE95016787; TRN: 95:006628
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 10. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) pulsed power conference, Albuquerque, NM (United States), 10-13 Jul 1995; Other Information: PBD: 1995
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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