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Published: 2010

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The purpose of this design study is to adapt the High Explosive Pulsed Power Isentropic Compression Experiment (HEPP-ICE) to milligram quantities of materials at stresses of ≈100 GPa. For this miniature application we assume that a parallel plate stripline of ≈2.5 mm width is needed to compress the samples. In any parallel plate load, the rising currents flow preferentially along the outside edges of the load where the specific impedance is a minimum [1]. Therefore, the peak current must be between 1 and 2 MA to reach a stress of 100 GPa in the center of a 2.5 mm wide parallel plate load; these are small relative to typical HEPP-ICE currents. We show that a capacitor bank alone exceeds the requirements of this miniature ICE experiment and a flux compression generator (FCG) is not necessary. The proposed circuit will comprise one half of the 2.4-MJ bank, i.e., the 6-mF, 20-kV, 1.2 MJ capacitor bank used in the original HEPP-ICE circuit. Explosive opening and closing switches will still be required because the rise time of the capacitor circuit would be of the order of 30 [mu]s without them. For isentropic loading in these small samples, stress rise times of ≈200 ns are required.