July 1997 Special Report of the Pulsed Power Inertial Confinement Fusion Program

		July 1997 Special Report of the Pulsed Power Inertial Confinement Fusion Program


	Time-exposure photograph of electrical flashover arcs produced over the surface of the water in the accelerator tank as a byproduct of Z operation. These flashovers are much like strokes of lightning.

130 eV radiation temperature measured in vacuum hohlraum on Z

An FY97 milestone of the pulsed power ICF Program at Sandia National Laboratories is to obtain a radiation temperature of 100 eV in a large-volume vacuum hohlraum on the 50-TW, 20-MA Z pulsed power accelerator by imploding a wire array placed inside the hohlraum. A temperature of 100 eV was first measured on April 1, 1997 in a 4-cm-diameter hohlraum coated with 25 microns of gold. Since then, this result has been repeated and, in our latest series of shots in July, we obtained a temperature of 130 eV by reducing the hohlraum diameter to 2.5 cm and the length from 2 cm to 1 cm. The z-pinch radiation source consisted of 300 tungsten wires, configured in a 1-cm-long, 2-cm-diameter cylindrical array. Attaining temperatures at these levels allows us to perform new types of radiation transport and equation of state experiments on Z that are of significance to the weapons physics community for stockpile stewardship. With a dynamic (imploding) hohlraum placed inside a multiple-wire array, we expect to produce hohlraum radiation temperatures of > 150 eV.

July 1997 Special Report of the Pulsed Power Inertial Confinement Fusion Program

130 eV radiation temperature measured in vacuum hohlraum on Z

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