Experimental and Numerical Studies of Megagauss Magnetic-Field Generation at LANL-NHMFL

The LANL-NHMFL Megagauss Facility has a well-established history of generating ultrahigh magnetic fields beyond 200 T for a broad range of applications. Using the 2-D Loughborough filamentary modeling, a detailed numerical analysis of the single-turn technique was performed. Single-turn calculations for the standard coil (10 × 10 × 3.2 mm) proved to be extremely accurate up to 40-kV capacitor bank charging, corresponding to a field of 185 T, and also revealed important aspects to be observed during experimentation. For pushing the boundaries toward 500 T, a major effort is under way to perform fast electromagnetic flux compression using a pulsed-power system mainly based on the same capacitor bank. Full details of the design for the new arrangement are given, and based on a well-proven 2-D filamentary modeling, the complex phenomena expected during the flux-compression process are highlighted.

I. Introduction

The Lanl-Nhmfl Megagauss Facility has been initially developed as a tool for investigating the 5- electrons of metallic Plutonium [1] and is the only “Megagauss” apparatus specifically designed to safely study hazardous samples and, therefore, to completely contain the blast and all debris resulting from a shot. This could be of great value when electromagnetic flux compression (EFC) will be performed, as the implosion will inevitably destroy the two-coil arrangement together with samples and sensors.