Reply To: Great News!

[asymmetric_implosion]

Sorry if you think I’m having a different conversation.

I was just doing the math on storing energy in an inductor to drive the pinch. My employer has a patent on inductive energy storage system for powering arcs. You basically use a DC supply to charge the inductor and then close a switch. You get the voltage needed to breakdown the arc and drive the current for like 100 us. That is my very limited background with inductive energy store (mainly from lunch room chats) so I was taking it from that perspective.

POS are crap above 1MA but some do work at the <1MA level. A machine at NRL, Hawk, uses a POS with reasonable success instead of a water line. They drive 700 kA in 200 ns or less.

I’m badly out of touch with compulsator tech, but I thought you need to brake the compulsator to extract energy from it. I take your comment to mean it is not true. I was also under the impression that 2 MA was beyond a compulsator with fast pulses like 10 us. Can you recommend any reading material so I can get caught up?

I’m not sure energy density is the biggest problem in pinch type pulse power systems. I think folks would use smaller pulse power if it was available but I don’t think anyone in the pinch community sees that as a driving area of research. Most of the problems seem to focus on faster rise times and load design.