Allan Brewer wrote:

Using Ohm’s law (apologies if I am being naive) for 1MA through a 20nm skin of the copper electrode does indeed give an answer, in the expected range, of around 2MW of heat from the anode and about the same from the cathodes. Beryllium has twice the resistivity so would double the heat “problem” (and increase the power required to initiate each shot?).

can you give the area and the length also, for us to check?

I used 20nm skin x circumference of 5cm diameter anode to give area, and 15cm of length. In practice the length varies during the pinch cycle, and I guess the length of feed cable from the capacitor bank will also heat, but approximate calculation only.

Feed cables wont be too significant a problem because capacitors are mounted around the outside edge of a flat sheet.

okay, 5 cm circumference gives 1e-9 m² as the area. resistivity of copper ~ 16.78 nΩ·m, yielding 2.5Ω for 15cm length; beryllium ~ 36 nΩ·m, giving 5.4Ω for a 15 cm length; Yes, now i see it. but it’s important to note that skin depth changes through the pulse.

Graphene electrical resistivity may be less than 5e-4 nΩ·m; and its in-plane thermal conductivity, around 5e3 W/(m·K), is greater than diamond. I am starting to like this a lot.

Shall we put a graphene coating on everything, then? Now all we have to do is figure out how.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/la101698j
http://nanopatentsandinnovations.blogspot.com/2010/01/fabrication-process-for-large-area.html