Numerical simulation on the operational characteristics of the pulsed inductive acceleration

To analyse the ionization and acceleration properties of an inductive plasma excited by a pulsed current flowing through the planar coil, the extended GLM formulations of the MHD (EGLM‐MHD) model, combined with the high‐temperature thermodynamic and transport model, is employed to simulate the characteristics of the flow. The two‐dimensional axisymmetric calculation captures the generation, growth, and acceleration of the current sheet, and the process is completed in the first half period. The sheet is mainly comprised of lower ionization level ions in the front and higher level ions at the back, and the density is one order higher than that of the residual plasma on the coil surface. As the abscissa value of the sheet is larger than the decoupling distance, a reversed flow emerges, generating a backward impulse, and the negative velocity can be more than 15 km/s at peak intensity B₀ = 0.5 T. In the second 1/4 period, the magnetic field and current density distribute non‐linearly on the surface and regularly in the sheet, caused by the reversing of the changing rate of the magnetic field and the particles' radial diffusion. The results at different intensities show that, for the same coil size, the time at which the maximum velocity V_max appears is advanced as the intensity increases, and V_max can be greater than 20 km/s above 0.5 T.