Capillary discharge source for high fidelity, plasma radiation source loads

Science based assessments of the response of systems and material to hostile nuclear environments require detailed verified material response and failure criteria for confident results. Consequently there is a need for the development of experimentaltechniques to measure low pressure equation of state parameters accurately and economically using radiation simulators. The development of a soft x-ray driven flyer plate (XFP) technique is proposed as the solution to this problem.Thin flyer plates can be accelerated by the blow off impulse generated by the total soft x-ray radiation emitted by a plasma radiating source (PRS). Hugoniot, relief adiabat, loading and unloading paths, response paths and failure criteria (yield, spall)can be accurately determined by measuring the propagation of the short duration, flat topped stress waves generated by the planer impact of thin flyer plates. Existing simulators and PRS can accelerate thin flyer plates to the required velocities. Theflyer plate assembly is a mulit-layer configuration that uses a layer of boron carbide to absorb the UV part of the spectrum and tamp the next layer, a K shell absorber. The impulse generated by these two layers is coupled to the flyer plate using rigidfoam so that the impulse driven shock waves do not damage the flyer plate.Development of the XFP techniques provides an economic means of characterizing a material for hardness assessments (typically a single PRS will generate 8 material data sets) and satisfies a critical requirement. It also provides another major use forradiation simulators. Since XFP techniques utilize the total yield of a simulator existing simulators are adequate for XFP experiments.