Profs. Jack Hare and Sander Lavine at the Cornell Laboratory for Plasma Studies recently finished two weeks of experiments on COBRA with Drs Hannah Hasson and Matt Gomez from Sandia National Laboratories. This work was funded through an LDRD on dynamic current switching, and our goal was to switch current from one load to a parallel load during the fast-rising current pulse. We started out by testing static current division with two solid loads, each with its own Rogowski coil to measure current (pictured). Later on we tested dynamic switching with exploding wire array loads, and managed to switch a substantial fraction of the drive current from one load to the other. We will be following up this experimental campaign with another two weeks in August, and we are also participating in a shot on Sandia’s Z Machine in Fall 2025, which will further explore this concept.

SNL is managed and operated by NTESS under DOE NNSA contract DE-NA0003525. SAND2025-02580