Noise measurements in shunted, shorted, and fully electroded quartz gauges in the Saturn plasma radiation source x-ray simulator

This paper describes recent work to improve the measurement of the stress response of materials to intense, short pulses of radiation. When Saturn fires, large prompt electrical noise pulses are induced in stress measurement circuits. The conventional wisdom has been that the shorted guard ring quartz gauge was the only configuration with acceptable prompt signal-to-noise characteristics for stress measurements in this pulsed radiation environment. However, because of abnormal signal distortion, the shorted guard ring gauge is restricted to a maximum stress of about 8 kbars. Below this level, the normal, quantified signal distortion is correctable with analytical deconvolution techniques. The shunted guard ring gauge is acceptable for Egli fidelity measurements to about 25 kbars with negligible signal distortion. Experiments were conducted on the Saturn soft x-ray source which show that higher fidelity shunted guard ring gauges can successfully measure stress with acceptable induced noise. We also found that a 50-ohm impedance matching resistor at the gauge reduced the prompt noise amplitude and improved the baseline quality of the measurement prior to shock wave arrival