Inductive Store Pulse Compression System for Driving High Speed Plasma Implosions

The Air Force Weapon Laboratory has investigated and developed inductive pulse compression techniques with fuse opening switches for driving high speed plasma implosions. Experiments have demonstrated the delivery of 7.5 MA to a 5-nH load in < 200 ns from an initial 1.9-MJ 2-μs capacitor bank via inductive pulse compression. Circuit considerations dictate the overall energy efficiency while MHD considerations dictate overall implosion stability and thermalization time. Theoretical considerations along with initial experiment results are presented in this paper.