Experiments on planar plasma flow switches at Los Alamos

The authors have performed a series of experiments on the Colt facility at Los Alamos to study the performance of plasma flow switches and to understand the important physics issues which affect that performance. These experiments were done in planar geometry on a small machine to allow for better diagnostic access and a higher repetition rate. The Colt facility is a capacitor bank which stores 300 kJ at maximum charge and produced a peak current of 1.1 MA in 2.0 microseconds for these experiments. The diagnostics used for these experiments included an array of b-dot probes, visible framing pictures, visible spectroscopy, and laser interferometry. Characteristics of the switch are determined from spatial and temporal profiles of the magnetic field and the spatial profile and temperature of the switch plasma. Here the authors present results from experiments for a variety of switch conditions