Journal
PHYSICS OF PLASMAS
Volume 19, Issue 9, Pages -Publisher
AIP Publishing
DOI: 10.1063/1.4751868
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration [DE-AC04-94AL85000]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This paper explores the role of electro-thermal instabilities on the dynamics of magnetically accelerated implosion systems. Electro-thermal instabilities result from non-uniform heating due to temperature dependence in the conductivity of a material. Comparatively little is known about these types of instabilities compared to the well known Magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor (MRT) instability. We present simulations that show electrothermal instabilities form immediately after the surface material of a conductor melts and can act as a significant seed to subsequent MRT instability growth. We also present the results of several experiments performed on Sandia National Laboratories Z accelerator to investigate signatures of electrothermal instability growth on well characterized initially solid aluminum and copper rods driven with a 20 MA, 100 ns risetime current pulse. These experiments show excellent agreement with electrothermal instability simulations and exhibit larger instability growth than can be explained by MRT theory alone. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4751868]
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available