The PHELIX pulsed power project: Bringing portable magnetic drive to world class radiography

The PHELIX pulsed power project will introduce magnetically driven hydrodynamics experiments to the Los Alamos National Laboratory´s proton radiography facility (pRad). The Precision High Energy-density Liner Implosion eXperiment (PHELIX) has been commissioned at Los Alamos. A small footprint capacitor bank consisting of four parallel connected single-stage marx units (~500 kJ) is cable coupled to a toroidal, current step-up transformer to deliver multi-Mega-Ampere, ~10 μs current pulses to cm size cylindrical loads. In a sequence of tests the performance of each component (capacitor bank and transformer) was evaluated and compared to a circuit model. The transformer coupling was observed to be k ~0.93. The tests culminated in a liner implosion experiment in which an ~3 cm radius, 0.8 mm thick, ~3 cm tall aluminum liner was accelerated to a velocity of ~ 1 km/s. The suite of machine diagnostics included linear Rogowski coils and Faraday rotation for current measurements. The experimental diagnostics include B-dot probes, multi-channel photon Doppler velocimetry (PDV), and single-frame, flash X-radiography to evaluate the performance of the high precision liner implosion. Currently, work is focused on integrating PHELIX into normal operations with the 800 MeV proton radiography facilities. There, high-resolution, high-frame-rate imaging of hydrodynamic experiments will be possible.