High Voltage Power Driver for the Centrifugal Mirror Fusion Experiment

In this work, we present a high voltage power driver scheme that will be used in tandem with the magnetic mirror field to rotate a plasma in the Centrifugal Mirror Fusion Experiment (CMFX) at the University of Maryland. The high voltage power driver would energize a long center electrode placed in the middle of the machine that would create a radial electric field that when crossed with the static magnetic field provided by two superconducting MRI solenoidal magnets, would create a centrifugal force that spins the plasma at high Mach numbers, thus providing axial confinement. This high voltage power driver would nominally operate in a two-stage mode. Initially it would drive the low impedance plasma with a low voltage 10kV capacitor bank and then phase in a separate power supply/capacitor bank that would drive the higher impedance plasma after the initial start-up. Simulations of the future experimental circuitry and results of a previous experiment, the Maryland Centrifugal Experiment (MCX) [R. F. Ellis et. al. Phys. Plasma 8, 2057 (200) & Phys. Plasmas 12, 055704 (2005)] will be presented.