Modeling Magnetically Insulated Power Flow In Mercury.

摘要

Mercury is a 50-ns, 6-MV, 360-kA accelerator with a magnetically-insulated, inductive-voltage-adder (MIVA) architecture. The machine was formerly known as KALIF-HELIA[1] at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in Germany but now, with some minor modifications[2], will be sited at NRL. Mercury can be operated in either positive or negative polarity[2-4]. Voltage is added in vacuum along a magnetically insulated transmission line (MITL) from six voltage adder cells. Understanding power flow and coupling to a load in this geometry requires the application of MITL theory[5-8]. Because the electric field stresses on the cathode in the MITL exceed the vacuum explosive-emission threshold, electron emission occurs and current flow is divided between current flowing in the metal and in vacuum electron flow. This electron flow manifests itself as a loss current until the total current is large enough to magnetically insulate the emitted electrons from crossing the anode-cathode (AK) gap.