Overview of the Atlas Project

Abstract

Atlas is a high energy pulsed power facility under development at Los Alamos National Laboratory to perform high energy-density experiments in support of the Department of Energy s stockpile stewardship responsibility. Its design is optimized for materials properties and hydrodynamics experiments under extreme conditions. Atlas will be operational in late-1999 and is designed to provide 100 shots per year. The Atlas capacitor bank design consists of a 36-MJ array of 240-kV Marx modules. The system is designed to deliver a peak current of 40-50 MA with a 4-5 (mu)s risetime. The Marx modules are designed to be reconfigured to a 480-kV configuration, if needed, for opening switch development. The bank is resistively damped to limit fault currents and capacitor voltage reversal. The system is configured for very low-inductance operation (total inductance ~ 10 nH) to rapidly implode heavy liner loads. An experimental program for testing and certifying prototype components is currently underway. For many applications the Atlas liner will be a nominal 70g aluminum cylinder. Using composite inner layers and a variety of interior target designs, a wide variety of experiments in ~cm3 volumes may be performed. These include shock compression experiments up to ~3 TPa (30 Mbar), quasi-adiabatic compressions up to 6-fold compression and pressures above 10 TPa, hydrodynamic instability studies in nonlinear and turbulent regimes over multi-cm propagation lengths, experiments with dense plasmas in the so-called high-gamma regime, studies of materials response at very high strains and strain rates, and materials studies in ultrahigh magnetic fields (above 10[expn 3] T).

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 1997
Accession Number
ADA639866

Entities

People

  • D. W. Bowman
  • E. O. Ballard
  • G. A. Bennett
  • J. F. Benage
  • J. H. Brownell
  • James C.Bucky Cochrane
  • R. J. Trainor
  • R. L. Bowers
  • R. R. Bartsch
  • W. Mark Parsons

Organizations

  • Los Alamos National Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Capacitors
  • Elements
  • Energy
  • Equations
  • Fibers
  • Geometry
  • High Energy
  • Instability
  • Magnetic Fields
  • Materials
  • Measurement
  • Metals
  • Physical Properties
  • Physics
  • Pulsed Power
  • Strain Rate
  • X Rays

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Electrical Engineering
  • Pulsed Power and Plasma Physics.