Abstract

The use of high power, short duration current pulses enables high pressures to be generated in a variety of materials with conditions that complement more traditional drives such as high energy lasers, gas guns or explosives. In this talk I shall present results from a variety of pulsed power driven shock physics experiments in the Institute of Shock Physics at Imperial College. Magnetically driven ramped pressure drives of ~100KBar peak have been created in solids using the 1.4MA MAGPIE generator; and the use of this and the new 2MA MACH generator will be discussed in experiments designed to measure the shear strength of materials. New methods of driving high pressures with dense jets of plasmas will be presented, and through a difference target configuration the production of large scale radiatve shock waves, scalable to astrophysics phenomena, have been created. Diagnostics for these experiments and being continually improved, and in future the high power/short pulse Cerberus laser coupled to the MAGPIE generator will enable a new class of experiments where the microscale is explored along with the meso and macro scale.