Millimeter-gap magnetically insulated transmission line power flow experiments

Author

B. T. Hutsel;B. S. Stoltzfus;E. W. Breden;W. E. Fowler;P. A. Jones;D. W. Justus;F. W. Long;D. J. Lucero;K. A. MacRunnels;M. G. Mazarakis;J. L. Mckenney;J. K. Moore;T. D. Mulville;J. L. Porter;M. E. Savage;W. A. Stygar

Author_Institution

Sandia National Laboratories, PO Box 5800, Mail Stop 1194, Albuquerque, NM, USA

fYear

2015

fDate

5/1/2015 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

5

Abstract

An experiment platform has been designed to study vacuum power flow in magnetically insulated transmission lines (MITLs). The platform is driven by the Mykonos-V LTD accelerator to drive a coaxial MITL with a millimeter-scale anode-cathode gap. The experiments conducted quantify the current loss in the MITL with respect to vacuum pumpdown time and vacuum pressure. MITL gaps between 1.0 mm and 1.3 mm were tested. The experiment results revealed large differences in performance for the 1.0 and 1.3 mm gaps. The 1.0 mm gap resulted in current losses of 40%-60% of the peak current. The 1.3 mm gap resulted in current losses of less than 5% of peak current. Classical MITL models that neglect plasma expansion predict that there should be zero current loss, after magnetic insulation is established, for both of these gaps.

Keywords

"Power transmission lines","Hardware","Cavity resonators","Transmission line measurements","Current measurement","Magnetosphere","Load flow"

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Pulsed Power Conference (PPC), 2015 IEEE

ISSN

2158-4915

Electronic_ISBN

2158-4923

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/PPC.2015.7296902

Filename

7296902