Compact Pulsed Power Machine which uses electromagnetic power to subject a material to high pressures.
A powerful alternative to shock waves
By applying sufficient pressure, we change the molecular structure of a material. By observing this process, we learn how to:
- Modify a material to enhance its strengths and minimize its weaknesses
- Combine one material with another material to synthesize a new one with the characteristics we seek
Traditionally, scientists have used shock waves to initiate such changes. A shock is most commonly administered as a violent, though carefully controlled, impact.
Not unlike slamming a crash-test dummy into a brick wall.
The strength of this approach is also its weakness. Shocking a material allows us to analyze the material in its “before” and “after” states, but doesn’t reveal much about the process.
Target which holds samples in the CPPF.
The gentler wave
If a shock wave is like slamming a car into a brick wall, a ramp wave drives it into the lake.
The amount of energy required to stop the car is the same either way, but the lake is gentler.
Ramp waves rise more gradually than shock waves, exerting a subtler force. They travel more slowly through a material, causing less heat and destruction.
Their impact on a material is more easily observed, so ramp waves give us a more exact picture of the changes happening within the material. Using ramp waves, we can:
- Identify the exact point at which a material’s fundamental nature changes
- Minutely adjust temperature and/or pressure during testing to detect and measure the ways each impacts the material.
- Vary the rates of temperature and pressure change; the ways a material responds to dynamic forces may differ radically from how it reacts to constant forces.
One of two in the U.S.
Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories learned to generate ramp waves using electricity. With their Pulsed Power Machine as a model, we developed a smaller Compact Pulsed Power Machine.
It’s one of two in the U.S.
Our CPPF offers efficiencies that shock wave technology can’t. It allows us to:
- Determine sample response and data in a single experiment
- Obtain the dynamic responses of two to four materials
Ramp-wave technology does not substitute for shock waves. However, used side by side, these technologies provide our partners with a greatly expanded array of experimental options.