Construction of the Plasma Liner Experiment (PLX)

The Plasma Liner Experiment (PLX) will investigate the behavior and interaction of spherically convergent plasma jets in forming imploding spherical plasma liners for HED and MIF-relevant studies. Numerous hardware systems have been assembled for the new PLX facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory to prepare for first plasma. A three meter diameter spherical vacuum tank is coupled to an oil-free vacuum pump system reaching sub-$10^{-6}$~torr pressures on the first pump-down. A modular, distributed, and portable 60~kV pulsed-power system has been constructed for initial experiments on single jet propagation and two jet merging, with each plasma gun source having 70~kJ of stored energy. In addition, a capacitor test stand has been constructed in order to test each of the 180 required capacitors to the expected operational voltage. Finally, the experiment will be controlled via FPGA/LabView to interact with numerous custom-built pieces of electronics for interlock, control, triggering, and data acquisition.