An alternative geometry for the acceleration of compact toroids

A parallel plate type rail-gun accelerator is proposed employing a slow formation generated compact toroid (CT) and a preacceleration compression. The perceived advantage of this type of accelerator is that it allows for both of the rail-gun electrodes to be externally supported thereby allowing for a longer acceleration stage as opposed to the present co-axial rail-gun accelerator where the center conductor must be supported entirely from one end. The efficiency of acceleration is expected to be high as the fraction of the electrical energy put into the rail gun that ends up as kinetic energy of the CT goes roughly as 1 - x/(s + x) where x is the length of the pre-acceleration compression region and s is the length of the acceleration stage. The slow formation of the CT should yield a cleaner longer lived CT and allows the formation and acceleration processes to be decoupled. Also the engineering requirements are less stringent in regards to gas valves and electrical systems. The pre-acceleration compression stage is a necessary artifact of the slow formation, it is however useful in its own right as it allows the use of larger capacitance, lower voltage capacitors. It should be noted that a slow formation and preacceleration compression stage have been implemented on RACE (a co-axial CT accelerator) at LLNL and are discussed