COBRA
COBRA is a low impedance (0.5 ohm), Marx bank configured, pulsed power generator for high energy density (HED) plasma research. It is designed to drive ~ 10 nH loads at 1 MA with 95-230 ns zero-to-peak pulses. COBRA has been used for a variety of HED experiments using conical wire arrays, laboratory plasma jets, magnetic reconnection geometries, X-pinches and gas-puff, wire array and liner Z-pinches. Staffing includes one machinist, two technicians, a research support specialist with a strong optics background, a postdoc, graduate students and three faculty, all familiar with the COBRA operation.
Diagnostics Summary
A 10 J, 3ns laser on green or IR for Thomson scattering, Faraday rotation or soft x-ray pulse generation
A 150 ps laser interferometer split into 3 pulses for schlieren or Mach-Zehnder interferometry.
A visible light streak camera
Two X-ray streak cameras
Two 750 mm spectrometers and two 300mm spectrometers
Two gated spectrometer cameras
A twelve-frame visible-UV camera
Two IR cameras
Two XUV, gated MCP quadrant cameras
Zeeman splitting diagnostic for magnetic field measurements
Several PCD’s and XRD’s for time resolved X-ray detection (one calibrated)
X-ray, time integrated pinhole cameras