Zero to 76,000 mph in a Second

www.livescience.com...

Scientists at the Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico have 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" – not only the fastest gun in the West, but in the world too.

The Z Machine is now able to propel small plates at 34 kilometers a second, faster than the 30 kilometers per second that Earth travels through space in its orbit about the Sun. That’s 50 times faster than a rifle bullet, and three times the velocity needed to escape Earth’s gravitational field.

The ultra-tiny aluminum plates, just 850 microns thick, are accelerated at 1010 g. One g is the force of Earth’s gravity. Doing so without vaporizing the plates was possible because of the finer control now achievable of the magnetic field pulse that drives the flight.

Z’s hurled plates strike a target after traveling only five millimeters, or less than a quarter-inch. The impact generates a shock wave -- in some cases, reaching 15 million times atmospheric pressure -- that passes through the target material. The waves are so powerful that they turn solids into liquids, liquids into gases, and gases into plasmas in the same way that heat melts ice to water or boils water into steam.

wouldn't you like a "z machine" in your car

just image the commercial for the car: "Zero to 76,000 mph in a Second"...

this is amazing!!!

The Z Machine

An electrical storm lights up the surface of the Z machine, an accelerator built to simulate what happens during a nuclear explosion. The electrical discharges result from powerful electric fields that the experiment produces.

Housed at Sandia National Laboratories, the Z machine attracted a lot of attention eight years ago when its energy output more than quadrupled – raising hopes that the reactions in the Z could provide a new source of clean, abundant power. To help further progress towards this end, the machine is getting a $61.7 million upgrade, officials announced recently.

The Z uses a short burst of intense electricity – only a few 10 billionths of a second long – that forces an ionized gas to implode. The process is called a z-pinch because the pulse creates a magnetic field that squeezes particles in the vertical direction, which math books usually label as the "z-axis."

At the center of the z-pinch, in the space of a small soup can, gas particles race at each other at a million miles an hour. The collisions result in X-rays and extremely high temperatures.

Last year, when physicists placed a capsule of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, at the focus of the z-pinch, they detected neutrons flying out from the implosion site – a signal that fusion reactions were taking place, as they do in the sun.

If researchers can learn to tame these fusion reactions, the setup can rely on a seemingly endless supply of deuterium fuel in seawater.

ENJOY!!!

I'm pretty sure that the Z machine is in a recent (last few years) guiness book of records.
Guess they wouldn't be allowed to fix it with a fork while it was turned on then.

It does look(and sound) cool though.

Personally, I'd hate to have 1010g in my car.

You'd be dead in an instant. Not to mention that 34kmps would be terrible for, like, driving.

All that horsepower, and nothing to do with it. Might as well tow the entire US Navy.

At anyrate, the Z machine is cool. The way it works and all. I'm a big fan of high-velocity thangs.

Good Lord, imagine the damage! Even a teensee-weensee projectile has the potential to wipe just about any hard target into a fine paste. WHACK!

I really just want it to replace the pollution producing power plants (coal and other stuff) because it's really polluting the earth. I don't want to live in a place that is not clean enough to survive in.

Originally posted by Der Kapitan
Good Lord, imagine the damage! Even a teensee-weensee projectile has the potential to wipe just about any hard target into a fine paste. WHACK!

Check out railguns. Not that fast, but they can shoot fast. The record is 15kmps for a .1g object. Not bad at all, not at all. The problem with them is they tend to weld due to the awesome energies.

That thing is absolutely awesome. I would like to have a whack at using it just so I can say for that moment that I have the ability to vaporize you. lol. But that's just an example of the need I have for 1-ups. Looks cool and that's a kick ass story to go with it.

.
If you can get around the air friction/heat problems , firing a stream of projectiles like these [only slightly thicker/bigger] at an incomming missile might be more cost effective, and have a better response [turnaround] time then launching another missile at the incoming one.

I don't suppose there is anyway of the disk packing its magnetic field with it?
Maybe you could put a ceramic coating on them to minimize oxidation.

With super ballistic speeds it makes the response time much less of an issue and makes the idea of a missile shield system actually feasible. At 76,000 mph you could circle the globe in 20 minutes, way faster than some slow incoming missile. If the aim is good you could keep hammering away at an incoming till it punched a hole in the shell and tearing it up inside as well, but the change in air-shape of the missile [with hole] would probably cause it to burn up and fall out of the sky.
.

Now if they can just get that speed up to 186,000 miles per second we would be on to something. (Time Travel Anyone???)




Good Post BTW!

very interesting!

thats a nice gun!

i wonder if it can pierce alien armor?

i wonder if they tested that out already

just speculating

Looks like something out of a Wachowski Brothers film.

This is nothing new. An acceleration of 1123 G's was reached first on September 5, 2000, directly away from me by my son Andy, when I asked him to clean up his room.

Originally posted by Off_The_Street
This is nothing new. An acceleration of 1123 G's was reached first on September 5, 2000, directly away from me by my son Andy, when I asked him to clean up his room.

if that's the case, i am sure this was done many times before...

This has been around for a while there is something called an electro-static launcher that propels thick metal plates at super high velocity in a fraction of a second using built up electro-static current.

I will try and find the link and edit my post.

www.wfu.edu...


A ring that is placed on the iron bar with the coil already energized will be suspended part way down the bar.

A Coke can hovers. Since it is not as thick as the ring, the current is smaller. It can hover, but it does not fly high in the air. Video. Still

Look at the above two quotes from the wfu link.... dont you think "anti-gravity" is somewhere in there..... The principles of what we are looking for to make Anti-G are right there in front of us. Its just a matter of applying the "law" that is controlling the above situation and finding a way to use the planets own "field" as the energy source.




Here is the Naval EM launcher in FY2004.

www.navysbir.com...

adsabs.harvard.edu...

Here is the prototyping theory back from 1987 on the subject

Publication Date:
09/1987
Category:
Electronics and Electrical Engineering

The performance of a continuous EM launcher is theoretically and experimentally characterized for the case of a linear actuator moving a magnetic (steel) ball at high speed by means of the magnetic field generated within a solenoid. There is no contact between the projectile and any part of its launcher's structure. A steel ball of 3.54 g can be launched at more than 150 m/sec with a 58 kA current; this corresponds to a flux density within the solenoid of 10 T.


So back in 1987 they were already playing around with this technology. This just goes to show how long in the black something is before the public even has a clue about it.



[edit on 9-6-2005 by robertfenix]

[edit on 9-6-2005 by robertfenix]

good post robertfenix

it deserves some recognition...

powerlabs.org/ has a bunch of stuff relating to this, railguns, etc. A great site, by the way.

Devices like this used to be really popular, and they thought it would be the perfect way to shoot missiles, travel, get to space. That was before they found limits with this sort of technology. WWII era was really promising.