Unlike aluminium or copper plasma armatures, hydrogen armatures of the same temperature and electron density are virtually transparent to ultraviolet and are totally transparent to soft x-rays (about 20 eV). Thus, it may be feasible to observe significant interior plasma dynamics with an appropriate experimental device. Some possible experiments of this type are discussed. The typical rail gun armature is aluminium or copper and a typical number densities of 1020 - 1021/cm3 and T about 3-5 eV is opaque to radiation well into the kilovolt x-ray region. As a result, spectroscopic diagnostics cannot provide any information about the interior of the plasma. The principal contribution to the short mean-free path for light absorption in metal plasmas is the bound-free transitions. By contrast, at these densities and temperatures, hydrogen is almost completely ionized and thus the only significant absorption mechanism is inverse bremstrahlung. This leads to a mean free path for 10 eV radiation in hydrogen which is in the range of a centimeter. Thus, hydrogen armatures are transparent in the soft x-ray region and if a hydrogen armature rail gun can be developed, soft x-ray spectroscopy can be used to explore the internal physical phenomena.
The potential of hydrogen armature experiments
Das Potential von Experimenten mit Wasserstoff-Armaturen
IEEE Transactions on Magnetics ; 22 , 6 ; 1464-1465
1986
2 Seiten, 2 Bilder
Aufsatz (Zeitschrift)
Englisch
Experiments with stable high velocity plasma armature
AIAA | 1993
|Solid ring armature experiments in a transaugmented railgun
Tema Archiv | 1995
|