Effect of a cathodic knife edge on the PFMA-1 pinch performance

This paper presents some experimental results obtained with the plasma focus PFMA-1 operated at about 20.5 kV, corresponding to a total capacitor bank energy of about 70 kJ, with 4He as working gas and pressure ranging between 50 and 3000 Pa. The aim of the study is the assessment of the differences in pinch performance with and without the adoption of a cathodic knife edge with the role of improving the electrical breakdown and the formation of the initial plasma layer. The pinch performance is estimated with the introduction of a voltage quality factor, which is related to the overvoltage intensity during the pinch, and of a current dip factor, correlated with the sudden total current reduction. More than 1500 shots have been analyzed with a semiautomated numerical special procedure. It is found that the improvement in the pinch efficiency with the use of a cathodic knife edge in these experiments can be even higher than a factor of 2. © 2009 IOP Publishing Ltd.