Inductive Plasma Accelerator (IPA)

The Inductive Plasma Accelerator (IPA) is a plasma accelerator/interaction experiment currently under constuction at MSNW. The accelerator will be capable of launching a Field Reversed Configuration (FRC) plasmoid having a mass of up to 0.2 mg with a diameter no larger than about 10 cm. In addition, the accelerator will be designed to attain plasma/plasmoid velocities up to~300 km/s while maintaining high uniformity and purity. Two IPAs will be arranged on a test bed to perform FRC merging experiments. In addition, an interaction chamber will be constucted to produce and implode~a plasma liner for enhanced compression experiments on the merged FRCs thus providing the first experimental test of the plasma liner fusion concept. 2D MHD simulations show expected densities of $>$ 10$^{22}$ m$^{-3}$ with ion temperatures in excess of 800 eV for the merging FRCs. The status of design and construction of the experiment and additional simulation results will be presented