Pulsed power performance of PBFA Z

PBFA Z is a new 60 TW/5 MJ electrical driver located at Sandia National Laboratories. The authors use PBFA Z to drive Z pinches. The pulsed power design of PBFA Z is based on a conventional single-pulse Marx generator, water-line pulse-forming technology used on the earlier Saturn and PBFA II accelerators. PBFA Z stores 11.4 MJ in its 36 Marx generators, couples 5 MJ in a 60 TW/105 ns pulse to the output water transmission lines, and delivers 3.0 MJ and 50 TW of electrical energy to the Z-pinch load. Depending on the initial load inductance and the implosion time, one attains peak currents of 16-20 MA with a rise time of 105 ns. Current is fed to the Z-pinch load through self magnetically-insulated transmission lines (MITLs). Peak electric fields in the MITLs exceed 2 MV/cm. The current from the four independent conical-disk MITLs is combined together in a double post-hole vacuum convolute with an efficiency greater than 95%. The authors achieved X-ray powers of 200 TW and X-ray energies of 1.9 MJ from a tungsten wire-array Z-pinch loads.