Tyler Jay Mason

This document summarizes the activities at the Mykonos Pulsed Power Facility during the calendar year 2025. Section 1 reports on the yearly shot statistics along with some facility highlights. Section 2 discusses the many improvements we were able to complete this year, thanks to the generous Mykonos Academic Access Programs (MAAP) funding from SSAP and Sandia strategic investments. Section 3 focuses on each individual campaign and their respective results.

Electrodes that produce a uniform electric field across their surfaces are desired for a variety of high-voltage systems, including spark-gap switches and transversely excited atmospheric lasers. Here, the implementation of uniform-field electrodes to a parallel-plate load is described for the study of vacuum power flow under pulsed-power applications. We begin with an overview of general uniform-field geometries and provide an open-source program that generates these geometries as described by Ernst. Following that, a modification to an existing power-flow experimental platform, which adopts a uniform-field geometry, is introduced and its utility is described. Finally, the preliminary experimental results are presented and future steps are outlined.

In this article, we derive an alternative expression for calculating the inductance of a single-channel spark-gap switch. We believe this new inductance expression provides greater clarity compared to other approaches. Interestingly, both the Rosa formula and the coaxial inductance formula, which are commonly used in such calculations, emerge as special cases of our new expression. To validate the proposed formula, we conducted COMSOL simulations that show excellent agreement with our theoretical predictions.

Fusion energy meets the twenty-first century World Grand Challenge of sustainable, ubiquitous, and safer energy sources. However, harnessing the promise of fusion energy has proven elusive. The competing approaches to fusion power plant design include inertial confinement fusion, National Ignition Facility (ICF-NIF, Z machine, etc.,) magnetic confinement fusion (MCF-Tokamak, stellarators, etc.), and other approaches that show promise in small- (flow stabilized Z pinches) or large-scale applications. These approaches are being accelerated with private and public funding and seek to demonstrate the feasibility of different approaches to fusion-based power plants. Yet, how can the necessary pulsed power technologies for these disruptive technology bases be accelerated with no clear “Dominant Design?” Roadmapping holds the promise to identify and develop common critical pulsed power components for laboratory, prototype, and commercial fusion, and can accelerate the commercialization of fusion reactor designs. A preroadmapping Workshop on Pulsed Power for Fusion was held at the IEEE International Pulsed Power Conference in San Antonio, TX, USA, in June 2023. The workshop had 177 attendees. Here, the common elements for many of the ICF technologies vying for dominant design were identified. The advancement of these technologies through roadmapping will enhance commercial expectations that require their rapid and innovative development in the next five years, as well as the next five to ten years. The key technologies identified that underpin and limit the advancement of fusion power include pulsed power technologies such as energy storage, high-voltage switching, additive manufacturing, and modular pulsed power circuit topologies. They are the focus of our effort in the following roadmap scenario, which will delineate potential paths to technology development.

• High current pulses conducted through stainless steel magnetically insulated transmission lines (MITLs) increase the temperature of the material which releases neutral gasses into the anode-cathode gap. These neutral gasses may then be ionized by the extreme electric fields or collisions and accelerated across the gap resulting in current loss [1]. Recently, interest in improving power flow has been growing and many researchers are working to mitigate these losses [2]. Hydrogen is of particular interest because it is known to cause much of the observed losses due to its it low mass, allowing for a sufficient acceleration to cross the gap on pulsed power timescales. To better understand the underlying processes that cause these losses, we have been studying the diffusion and desorption of hydrogen from stainless steel.