Thor's Hammer to Crush Materials at 1 Million Atmospheres

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Furthermore, because Thor can fire so frequently — less hardware damage per shot requires fewer technicians and enables more rapid rebooting — researchers will have many more opportunities to test an idea, he said.

But there’s more at stake than extra experiments or even new diagnostics. There’s testing the efficiency of a radically different accelerator design.

Radical shoeboxes

Thor’s shoebox-sized units, known as “bricks,” contain two capacitors and a switch. The assembled unit is a fourth-generation descendant of a device jointly developed by Sandia and the Institute of High-Current Electronics in Tomsk, Russia, called a linear transformer driver (LTD). The original LTD units, also called “bricks,” had no cables to separate outputs, but instead were linked together to add voltage as well as current. (Because Thor’s bricks are isolated from each other, they add current but not voltage.)

Everything depends upon adding bricks. Sandia is building Thor in stages and already has assembled materials.  Two intermediate stages are expected in 2016. These will comprise 24 bricks (Thor 24) and 48 bricks (Thor 48). “These are ‘first-light’ machines that will be used for initial experiments and validation,” Reisman said.

Thor 144, when completed, should reach 1 million atmospheres of pressure.

Sandia manager Bill Stygar said more powerful LTD versions of Z ultimately could bring about thermonuclear ignition and even high-yield fusion.

Ignition would be achieved when the fusion target driven by the machine releases more energy in fusion than the electrical energy delivered by the machine to the target. High yield would be achieved when the fusion energy released exceeds the energy initially stored by the machine’s capacitors.

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