Simulation of a plasma-gun voltage generator

Summary form only given, as follows. The Phillips Laboratory's 2 1/2 dimensional magnetohydrodynamics code MACH2 was successfully used to simulate a fast rise time, high voltage generator to drive high impedance loads. The generator operates based on a flux compression scheme using a plasma armature. In this scheme the magnetic flux in the inner region of a solenoid, the seed field, is compressed by the discharge of a high current in a hydrogen prefill. In simulating the experiment an in-house, time-dependent magnetostatics code, DDcode, was used to generate the seed field. This field was then used to set the initial conditions for the field in the MACH2 simulation. Compression of the field yielded high voltage pulses that were in good agreement with the experiment in the open circuit voltage mode. An external RLC circuit was also added to the code in order to study the load line behavior of the generator.