Imagine a gun sending bullets at 34 kilometers per second, faster than Earth moves through space. This is the new speed record recently broken by the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL). With this machine, Sandia researchers have "accelerated a small plate from zero to 76,000 mph in less than a second." But not for long: their bullets are very small aluminum plates -- only 30 mm by 15 mm in cross-section, and 850 microns thick. And the "bullets" don't go very far. They can strike their targets after only five millimeters, but their impacts create incredible shock waves, reaching up to 15 million times the atmospheric pressure. Among other things, the researchers hope that their machine will help them to stabilize the U. S. nuclear stockpile without having to explode a nuclear weapon or to better understand what's inside Saturn and Jupiter. Read more.
Here are the opening paragraphs of the SNL news release.
Sandia National Labs has accelerated a small plate from zero to 76,000 mph in less than a second.
The speed of the thrust was a new record for Sandia’s Z Machine -- sometimes referred to as the fastest gun in the West. Actually the fastest in the world, it is now able to propel small plates at 34 kilometers a second, faster than the 30 km/sec that Earth travels through space in its orbit about the sun, 50 times faster than a rifle bullet, and three times the velocity needed to escape Earth’s gravitational field.
This spectacular picture shows the "arcs and sparks" produced during the Z machine shootings (Credit: Sandia National Laboratories). And here is a link to a larger version (2.52 MB).
The picture above shows Marcus Knudson, Sandia researcher and lead scientist for this project, with "the Z insert that sends flyer plates hurling at phenomenal speeds" (Credit: Randy Montoya/Sandia National Laboratories). And here is a link to a much larger version (710 KB).
Here is some more technical information.
An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
The plates are small -- only 30 mm by 15 mm in cross-section, and 850 microns thick. The trick in accelerating the fragile aluminum plates at 10-to-the-10th Gs (force of Earth’s gravity) without vaporizing them lies in the finer control now achievable of the magnetic field pulse driving the flight.
The arrival of energy at the target is staggered over three hundred nanoseconds, so that the amperage arrives less like a brick wall that would vaporize the plate and more in controllable increments.
All these numbers are impressive, but what can we expect from such a system? Here is the SNL answer.
The immediate purpose of these very rapid flights is to help understand the extreme conditions found within the interiors of the giant planets Saturn and Jupiter, hasten the achievement of virtually unlimited energy through peacetime atomic fusion, and provide more information about the condition of the U. nuclear stockpile without having to explode a nuclear weapon.
As I'm not a nuclear physicist, I wouldn't have immediately thought of these possible usages. But after all, they're the specialists.
And they still have other tricks in their bags. They want to achieve plate velocities of 45 to 50 kilometers per second within a year.
Sources: Sandia National Laboratories news release, via EurekAlert!, June 7, 2005; and SNL website
The machine is impersonal, it takes the pride away from a piece of work, the individual merits and defects that go along with all work that is not done by a machine—which is to say, its little bit of humanity.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
Related stories can be found in the following categories.
Energy
Nuclear
Physics
Space.