THE ATLAS PROJECT - A NEW PULSED-POWER FACILITY FOR HIGH-ENERGY DENSITY PHYSICS EXPERIMENTS

Atlas is a facility being designed at Los Alamos National Laboratory ( LANL) to perform high-energy-density experiments in support of weapon physics and basic research programs. It is designed to be an internati onal user facility, providing experimental opportunities to researcher s from national laboratories and academic institutions. For hydrodynam ic experiments, it will be capable of achieving a pressure exceeding 3 0 Mbar in a several cubic centimeter volume. With the development of a suitable opening switch, it will be capable of producing more than 3 MJ of soft X-rays. The capacitor bank design consists of a 36 MJ array of 240 kV Marx modules. The system is designed to deliver a peak curr ent of 45-50 MA with a 4-5-mu s rise time. The Marx modules are design ed to be reconfigured to a 480-kV configuration for opening switch dev elopment. The capacitor bank is resistively damped to limit fault curr ents and capacitor voltage reversal. An experimental program for testi ng and certifying prototype components is currently underway. The capa citor bank design contains 300 closing switches. These switches are a modified version of a railgap switch originally designed for the DNA-A CE machines. Because of the large number of switches in the system, in dividual switch prefire rates must be less than 10(-4) to protect the expensive target assemblies. Experiments are underway to determine if the switch-prefire probability can be reduced with rapid capacitor cha rging.