Coupling Power Flow From The Mercury Miva Into A Rod-Pinch Diode.

摘要

The Mercury machine at NRL, formerly known as KALIF-HELIA [1] at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (Germany), is a magnetically-insulated inductive voltage adder (MIVA), nominally delivering a 50-ns, 6-MV, 360-kA, 2.2-TW power pulse into a 16- load [2,3,4]. Mercury is capable of operating in both positive and negative polarities with little penalty in pulsed-power output. Polarity reversal is achieved by insertion of the tapered center conductor into the opposite end of the MIVA. In this work, particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations [5,6] are used to investigate the power flow within the magnetically-insulated transmission line (MITL) in both polarities. Of particular importance is the efficiency of operation when an over-matched 50- rod-pinch-diode load is couple to the MITL, operated in either positive [7] or negative [8] polarity. Such a diode is used for radiographic applications because of the small, high brightness radiation source produced by the electron pinch at the end of the diodes anode rod [9]. Simple positive and negative polarity diode geometries are studied in preparation for initial rod-pinch diode experiments on Mercury.