Overview of the Atlas project

Atlas is a high energy pulsed power facility under development at Los Alamos National Laboratory to perform high energy-density experiments in support of the DoE´s stockpile stewardship responsibility. Its design is optimized for materials properties and hydrodynamics experiments under extreme conditions. Atlas will be operational in late-1999 and is designed to provide 100 shots per year. The Atlas capacitor bank design consists of a 36 MJ array of 240 kV Marx modules. The system is designed to deliver a peak current of 40-50 MA with a 4-5 /spl mu/s risetime. The Marx modules, are designed to be reconfigured to a 480 kV configuration, if needed, for opening switch development. The bank is resistively damped to limit fault currents and capacitor voltage reversal. The system is configured for very low-inductance operation to rapidly implode heavy liner loads. An experimental program for testing and certifying prototype components is underway. For many applications the Atlas liner will be a nominal 70 g aluminum cylinder. Using composite inner layers and a variety of interior target designs, a wide variety of experiments´ in /spl sim/cm/sup 3/ volumes may be performed. These include shock compression experiments up to /spl sim/3 TPa (30 Mbar), quasi-adiabatic compressions up to 6-fold compression and pressures above 10 TPa, hydrodynamic instability studies in nonlinear and turbulent regimes over multi-cm propagation lengths, experiments with dense plasmas in the so-called high-gamma regime, studies of materials response at very high strains and strain rates, and materials studies in ultrahigh magnetic fields (above 10/sup 3/ T).