Early history of Explosive Pulsed Power: 1943–1970

Explosive driven magnetic compression was first proposed by J.L. Fowler and Woodward in late 1943 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) during the Manhattan project. Implosion of a liner immersed in an external magnetic field would generate a signal that could be detected with a pickup coil. The objective was to measure the rate of implosion of the liner. The first flux compression experiment was conducted by J.L. Fowler on January 4, 1944. An analysis of the data from these experiments showed that the fields were compressed from a few gauss to a few hundred gauss. By June 1944, J.L. Fowler and his team were getting reproducible scope traces for imploding cylinders and spheres that were in good agreement with other diagnostic methods. This was the genesis for the work later carried out by C.M. Fowler at Los Alamos. In addition to LANL, there were several other Flux Compression Generator (FCG) programs conducted at various universities and organizations in the 1960s including Davidson Laboratory of the Stevens Institute of Technology for Picatinny Arsenal, Poulter Laboratories of the Stanford Research Institute for the Air Force Systems Command, Illinois Institute of Technology (ITT) for the Army Research Office, and Aerojet Corporation. Other countries including Russia, China, France, Italy, and England had established FCG programs in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1957, F.W. Neilson designed, built, and tested both Ferroelectric Generators (FEGs) and Ferromagnetic Generators (FMGs) at Sandia National Laboratory (SNL). This led to programs at Sandia in the 1960s to develop compact single shot power supplies. In addition, explosive driven FEGs were investigated by other others such as M.F. Rose, W.L. Gilbertson, and others at the Naval Surface Weapons Center, P.E. Houser at Picatinny Arsenal, and W.L. Baker at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory. In this paper, we will review FCG and FEG programs that occurred in the U.S. and other countries during the period ranging from 1943 - 1970.

I. Introduction

Explosive Pulsed Power (EPP) ¹

References are available from the author upon request.

is generally defined as the conversion of the chemical energy stored in high explosives into electrical energy by propelling a conductive medium through a magnetic field and compressing it or the generation of a shock that initiates the release of energy stored in ferromagnetic, ferroelectric or superconducting materials. It is important to note that these latter examples do not convert the explosive energy into electrical energy in the usual sense. The energy is already stored in the ferromagnetic or ferroelectric material.