Flux compression experiments on the Z accelerator

A flux compression configuration was designed and tested on the Z accelerator to investigate the possibility of power amplification as well as energy density increase with such a scheme. The front end of Z was redesigned to decouple D level from A, B and C levels. An external coil, generating a quasi-static magnetic field B, in the range of 1 to 5 T, was added. The flux compressing liners were made from 6-cm long 4-cm initial radius W or Al wire arrays. The "armature" liner was imploded under the action of the current from levels A, B, and C into a compression chamber seeded with an azimuthal magnetic field generated with D level. B/sub 2/ was initially applied to the system in order to reduce the growth rate of RT instability. Short circuit loads as well as radiative loads were tested with this stage. These experiments included electrical diagnostics as well as a magnetic pressure measurement with VISAR on shot 356 and radiation diagnostics on shots Z366 and Z428.