Research and Development of a Plasma Jet Mass Accelerator as a Driver for Impact Fusion. Final Report

摘要

A Ten Module Accelerator has been designed, fabricated and tested at projectile velocities up to 5 km/sec. It has been shown that a projectile with mass less than a half gram can be accelerated by a succession of momentum kicks from plasma jets. The significance of this acceleration mechanism is that it can be used, in principle, to accelerate projectiles to several hundred kilometers per second as a driver for inertial fusion or other energy-related applications. A theoretical base has been developed to understand the physics of plasma jet generation and the coupling of the jet momentum to the projectile. (ERA citation 09:034843)