Shock compression experimental capabilities of the Atlas facility.

Atlas is a high-energy pulsed-power facility under construction at Los Alamos National Laboratory. When completed in late 2000, Atlas will provide a laboratory environment to perform shock compression experiments in regimes presently unattainable by other methods. The high-energy-density environment on Atlas will be produced by the rapid (~4 μs) implosion of a 20-40 gram, ~4 cm radius, 4 cm length cylindrical aluminum or aluminum/high-Z composite liner, driven by a fast current pulse of ~32 MA from a 24 MJ capacitor bank. Implosion velocities up to 20 km/s are predicted, allowing Hugoniot experiments to ~20 Mbar and quasi-adiabatic compression to several Mbar. However, many issues face us in performing such experiments, including how to diagnose conditions inside the imploding liner, how to correct results for distortions and density gradients created by the cylindrical geometry and magnetic drive, and how to prevent geometric distortions and instabilities from degrading results. In this paper, liner performance is predicted for a shock compression experiment utilizing 1-D MHD simulations, and the effect of gradients in density, pressure, and velocity in the impactor prior to collision are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]