Walter Louis Atchison

Pulsed Power Hydrodynamics (PPH) is a new application of low-impedance, pulsed power technology to the study of complex hydrodynamics, instabilities, turbulence, and material properties in a highly precise, controllable environment at the extremes of pressure and material velocity. The Atlas facility, designed and built by Los Alamos, is the world s first, and only, laboratory pulsed power system designed specifically to explore this relatively new family of pulsed power applications. Constructed in the year 2000 and commissioned in August 2001, Atlas is a 24-MJ high-performance capacitor bank delivering currents up to 30-Megamperes with a rise time of 5 to 6- sec. The high-precision, cylindrically imploding liner is the tool most frequently used to convert electromagnetic energy into the hydrodynamic (particle kinetic) energy needed to drive strong shocks, quasi-isentropic compression, or large volume, adiabatic compression for the experiments. At typical parameters, a 30-gr, 1-mm-thick liner with an initial radius of 5-cm, and an intermediate current of 20- MA can be accelerated to 7.5-km/sec producing megabar shocks in medium density targets. Velocities up to 20- km/sec and pressures 20-Mbar in high density targets are possible. See also ADM002371. 2013 IEEE Pulsed Power Conference, Digest of Technical Papers 1976-2013, and Abstracts of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science. IEEE International Pulsed Power Conference (19th). Held in San Francisco, CA on 16-21 June 2013., The original document contains color images.