Advanced Simulator Power Flow Technology/Advanced Radiation Simulation.

This report describes work conducted in FY 94 for the Advanced Simulator Power Flow TechnologyAdvanced Radiation Simulation Program. The report deals with analytical, computational and experimental studies of power flow in vacuum feed and switch regions of pulsed power, inductive energy store systems. The first section describes a method for the calculation of magnetic fields and inductances in 3-D convolute geometry, and results for convolute vacuum fields in ACE-4 and in SATURN. Section 2 describes hydrodynamic calculations of the evolution of the switch plasma without pulsed power and compares the computed and measured densities. Section 3 concerns the effect of insulated electron flow on gap formation in a switch, and the ultimate fate of the launched electrons as they drift form the switch into the vacuum feed. Section 4 summarizes improvements in our snowplow, circuit analysis and mesh generation codes. In Section 5, power flow experiments, techniques used to measure electron density and other plasma characteristics are described. The characteristics of the ACE-4 radial and coaxial plasma opening switches are measure, and the results compared with analogous results obtained from the HAWK generator at the Naval Research Laboratory, and with results calculated by means of the snowplow code.