Staged Z-pinch for Fusion, Experiment and Simulation

The Staged Z-pinch is a magneto-inertial fusion concept in which a high-Z liner implodes onto a D or DT target. Initial target heating is provided by a shock launched from the interface due to ram & magnetic pressures. The contribution of magnetic pressure has been shown in numerical studies to increase with higher-Z. Axial magnetic flux frozen into plasma does not behave self-similarly and this relaxes the required initial field strength to sufficiently mitigate MRT growth. This is supported by both experimental data on the 1-MA Zebra and MHD simulations of MACH2 and HYDRA, which shows good agreement with experiment in terms of implosion dynamics, convergence, and neutron yield. From simulation, the average stagnation ion density and temperature is 5.0x10²⁰ cm^-3 and 6KeV, respectively. We observed consistent neutron yield of ~ 1.0x10¹⁰ , convergence ratio of 8-12 and peak implosion velocity exceeds 400 km/s. We expect to achieve comparable target stagnation conditions on LTD-III, a linear transformer driver that stores much less energy than Zebra, but couples comparable energy to the load. We will also present a scaling study of LTD-III for higher current(7-10MA) and discuss a conceptual design of a modular LTD machine.