ATLAS parameter study

The purpose of this study is to make an independent assessment on the parameters chosen for the ATLAS capacitor bank at LANL. The contractor will perform a study of the basic pulsed power parameters of the ATLAS device with baseline functional parameters of >25 MA implosion current and <2.5 microsecond current risetime. Nominal circuit parameters held fixed will be the 14 nH from the vacuum interface to the load, and the nominal load impedances of 1 milliohm for slow loads and 10 milliohms for fast loads. Single Ended designs, as opposed to bipolar designs, will be studied in detail. The ATLAS pulsed power design problem is about inductance. The reason that a 36 MJ bank is required is that such a bank has enough individual capacitors so that the parallel inductance is acceptably low. Since about half the inductance is in the bank, and the inductance and time constant of the submodules is fixed, the variation of output with a given parameter will generally be a weak one. In general, the dl/dt calculation demonstrates that for the real system inductances, 700 kV is the optimum voltage for the bank to drive X-ray loads. The optimum is broad, and there is little reduction in performance at voltages as low as 450 kV. The direct drive velocity analysis also shows that the optimum velocity is between 480 and 800 kV for a variety of assumptions, and that there is less than a 10% variation in velocity over this range. Voltages in the 120 kV--600 kV range are desirable for driving heavy liners. A compromise optimum operating point might be 480 kV, at which all X-ray operation scenarios are within 10% of their velocity optimum, and heavy liners can be configured to be near optimum if small enough. Based on very preliminary studies the author believes that the choice of a single operating voltage point (say, 480 kV) is unnecessary, and that a bank engineered for dual operation at 480 and 240 kV will be the best solution to the ATLAS problem