Results and simulations from the triggered plasma opening switch experiment

Summary form only given, as follows. Sandia National Laboratories has a program underway to develop a command-triggered plasma opening switch at the multi-megavolt and megampere level. In the triggered opening switch, moving the conducting plasma breaks the storage inductor circuit and causes rapid energy transfer to the load. This system uses fast-rising magnetic fields of order one Tesla to push a plasma with density about 10/sup 14/ electrons per cm/sup 3/. For opening cm-sized gaps on a 20-nanosecond time scale, this plasma must be accelerated to tens of cm per microsecond. The total volume of the plasma is 10-20 liters. This requires a few kilojoules of energy. A driver that provides the required magnetic field presently operates routinely. This paper will describe the required performance of the trigger field driver and the measured results, as well as computer simulations of the fields in the region of interest. Since the system structure necessarily has important three-dimensional features, computer simulations are valuable for designing hardware and analyzing the data from the experiment. The few-kJ required from the trigger pulser must be supplied in a relatively fast 30 ns time scale. The cost of this field is high enough that it´s important to maximize the energy efficiency of the system. We will show the design constraints and the measured results compared to numerical simulations. We will also show results from experiments with plasma and the trigger magnetic field.