A Platform to Study High-Field FRC Formation on the Maize Linear Transformer Driver

Field-reversed configurations (FRCs) have become attractive targets for magneto-inertial fusion, a.k.a. magnetized target fusion (MTF), which may offer a more economical path to fusion gain greater than unity. Slutz et al 1 has simulated FRC formation and compression via a solid imploding liner on the Z-machine (20+ MA, 100 ns), located at Sandia National Labs. These FRC targets would be unique for an MTF campaign in that they would be formed with very strong fields (10-100 T), be centimeter-scale in size, and be formed in-situ (requiring no translation stage). With a 30 T bias axial field, LASNEX simulations suggest fusion yield from the compressed FRC could approach liner kinetic energies typically obtained in MagLIF 2 .