A compact and maintainable source of 80-keV neutral beams that focus to a high power density is required for the Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF). In the new source being designed and built to meet these requirements, the cross-sectional area is reduced in two ways: by immersing the source in a vacuum where high voltage can be held over smaller distances and by redesigning grid supporting structures. Reliability is increased by reducing the electric fields everywhere else below those present between grids and by design innovations. The latter include techniques to reduce stray magnetic field and disperse gas uniformly, all metal-ceramic construction, and a 60-kV shield enclosing all 80-kV electrodes. Wherever possible, we have attempted to simplify the construction. We expect to solve problems that arise during testing either with add-on fixes or with the techniques already tested successfully on the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) 120-keV source. Easy maintenance is obtained by a compact isolation valve and by modular construction. Curving both the grid wires and their holders provides focusing in two planes.

Apparatus is described for rapidly manipulating a hollow glass microsphere laser fusion target and scanning the entire wall with a double pass interference microscope.

Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLL) designed a cost-effective, regulated 15-V, 7500-A filament supply for use with the High-Voltage Test Stand , a major ERDA developmental neutral-beam test facility. The filament supply can float to 200 kV and can provide pulse widths up to 30 s. Powered by a 24-V, 0.5-TJ battery bank, it avoids the use of expensive isolation transformers and induction voltage regulators (IVR's). Battery output is regulated by a water-cooled resistor-contactor combination in which contactors are closed in sequential format to create a staircase current waveform. A fine-tuning network tunes in-between the ''steps'' for regulation to less than 0.5 percent. The regulator is digitally controlled except for the sense amplifiers, which are optically coupled to the digital controller. All ground telemetry uses optical links to minimize effects of rfi and emi noise in the data channels.

When designing a capacitor bank for energy storage, the engineer should not use more capacitors, voltage, or energy than necessary to supply the load and to overcome losses. Universal curves presented here aid the designer in making intelligent choices. For example, there is a minimum stored energy to be achieved, but no minimum voltage at which to store it. Included in the curves are the effects of series losses such as voltage drops in regulator tubes or in current-limiting resistors. Capacitor bank designs for the neutral-beam power supplies on 2XIIB and TMX are compared using the developed criteria.

A technique is described for making contact microradiographs of microsphere targets, and for obtaining the target characteristics by fitting the data with a parametric equation.

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A minimodular, data-acquisition system can be used to rapidly interrogate a 45-point matrix of beam-current sampling targets over the 3- x 12-in. rectangular, output beam cross section of a 50-A, neutral-beam ion source. This system, operating at a throughput rate of 12 ..mu..s per channel, can make several complete scans during the 10- to 25-ms-duration beam pulse. Data obtained are available in both analog and digital form. The analog signal is used to create an immediately interpretable CRT display of the beam-current density profile that shows how well the source is aimed. The digital data are held in buffer memory until transfer to a minicomputer for software processing and plotting.