Preliminary performance of the CHARYBDIS plasma focus at Texas A&M University

Summary form only given, as follows. A new plasma focus machine, CHARYBDIS, is being assembled at Texas A&M University on its Riverside Research Campus. This system will be a 60 kV capacitor bank with a maximum energy storage of /spl sim/475 kJ. The capacitor bank will be assembled using 144 of the 1.85 /spl mu/F, 60 kV capacitors from the original SHIVA machine, donated from the Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque. The power supply for this machine will be a salvaged, ANTARES, /spl plusmn/80 kV unit from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Six rail-gap switches, from the ATLAS program, will switch the bank into its load. The plasma focus device and its supporting equipment was originally used at Los Alamos on a number of capacitor configurations. When fully operational, this machine should provide peak currents of 3 to 4 MA to the plasma focus, with a rise time of about 5 /spl mu/s. From experience with a modular machine at LANL that stored, 260 kJ, 580 kJ, or 780 kJ at 120 kV, we expect this system to exceed the performance of the LASL, DPF6.5 machine, abstracted in the 1973 APS Plasma Conference.