Examination of resistivity issues in solid liner z-pinches

Experiments being conducted at the Los Alamos National lab Pegasus facility are examining driving an aluminum liner with a pulsed magnetic field. The Pegasus facility provides a current of 5 to 8 Mega-amps to compress a cylindrical liner. Liners of various size and thickness are used, depending on the specific experimental objectives. In several of these experiments, a B-dot probe has been used to measure the field diffused through the liners. This data has been compared to predictions of field penetrations using numerical simulations. These predictions were made with a 2D Eulerian and a 1D Lagrangian MHD code. The simulations were made with a wide variety of resistivity models including both SESAME tabular values and analytic models. the results of these comparisons show that the behavior of aluminum in the region from a few tenths of a eV to 1eV and densities from about .2 to 3.0 g/cc is not reproduced well. While this is understandable based on the back of conclusive data in the region, these experiments confirm the in-applicability of extrapolating existing models into this region where phase changes are drastically changing the behavior