Design of FRC Formation and Liner Compression Experiment (F-LINCX) at AFRL

An experiment to form, translate, and adiabatically compress plasmas in field-reversed configurations (FRC's) is now being designed at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque, NM. This experiment is referred to as "F-LINCX", for Formation, LINer Compression experiment. Over the past six years, the AFRL has been working in close collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory's FRC formation experiment, FRX-L. The AFRL experiment will reproduce the electrical properties of FRX-L to ensure that FRC's of similar parameters are formed. After formation, the FRC will be translated into the interior of a 10-cm diameter, 30-cm long aluminum solid liner, and the Shiva Star Capacitor Bank will be used to implode the liner and compress the FRC to magnetized target fusion (MTF) relevant densities and temperatures. Based upon FRX-L's present configuration, the FRC formation will require four separate capacitor banks. These banks include two slow rise-time banks to first establish a bias magnetic field in a 10-cm diameter, 36-to- 45-cm long theta discharge region and higher-intensity cusp fields at both ends of this region. Inside the theta discharge region will be a 50 to 100 mTorr deuterium pre- fill; a fast bank will pre-ionize this gas with an oscillating field comparable to the bias field. The last bank will drive a reverse-field in the theta discharge region with an amplitude approximately 10 times greater than the initial bias field. This bank will be crowbarred to lengthen decay time and FRC lifetime. To translate the FRC from the theta discharge region to the liner, one or two additional slow banks are needed to set up a guide field and a mirror field at the opposite end of the liner. The status of the F-LINCX experiment is discussed, along with relevant circuit and hardware designs for the capacitor banks. A proposed design for the integrated theta discharge, translation, and liner implosion regions is also presented.