Design of a material ablation test stand

Summary form only given, as follows. A test stand is being designed to measure the ablation rate and threshold of plasma facing materials. A plasma armature is used to ablate the surface of the test material. The heat flux and exposure time are controlled by setting the armature current and backfill gas pressure. Ablation parameters may be determined by measuring the free arc´s velocity under various material surface heating loads. The current source will consist of multiple modules that can be independently charged and fired in order to produce arbitrary pulse shapes. The current amplitude will be set by disconnecting the modules from the high voltage dc power supply once the appropriate capacitor voltages have been reached. The charging system will utilize power electronics and feedback control to regulate both the charging voltage and current. A data acquisition and control system will be used to operate the test stand and acquire and process the data.