Study of instability formation in liners driven with a compact linear transformer driver

Summary form only given. Results of instability formation in metallic liners driven by GenASIS, a Linear Transformer Driver (LTD) capable of producing 250 kA current in 150 ns are presented. Different material liners (Aluminum, Copper and Nickel) with thicknesses ranging from 1 to 5 μm and diameter of 2 mm have been tested. We used laser probing techniques such as schlieren and interferometry to diagnose instabilities on the outside surface of the liners using four frames separated by 15 ns per frame. In addition, we used Extreme Ultra-Violet (XUV) radiation to study the evolution of the liners. We observed that the instabilities are produced within 100 ns of the current start and these grow with time. Experiments have been modeled using the hybrid code LSP. The relationship between electro-thermal and Magneto-Rayleigh Taylor instabilities has also been studied. We show that it is possible to study interesting physics relevant for MagLIF [1] concept using small-scale university device.