Z Machine: the People

one day you'll be protecting vacuum we have a tool here that nobody else on the planet does and this provides a sort of unfettered and exclusive access to states that just cannot be created any other way outside of a weapons test D is basically a giant battery it's a big capacitor bank the entire innards of Z is a series of stages meant to simply take that electrical pulse and compress it in space compress it in time and generate the most extreme pulse of electrical power that you can on this planet and that energy is funneled down to a tiny little centimeter sized target region at the very middle of the facility and that's where the physics experiment is but you need all of this infrastructure to be able to create that that Momentis pulse of energy that we use in our experiments Z is coupling more power to the center of the Machine than the entire world's power generation capacity in fact many times over there is a massive operation that has to be undertaken for every single shot the teams that are actually doing the science that are looking to accomplish some kind of scientific goal here on the machine they may be planning for that years in advance the facility starts planning for shots anywhere between six months and two years out she has probably on the order of 50 people that actively work every day on the machine the center has about 300 physicists there additional managers support staff makes a large group of people to get a shot a shot director is a communications focal point for all the activities throughout the shot cycle their job is to inform people of what the shot plan of the day is and then if any changes occur and to get groups together to manage those changes so that we can get a shot and again every experiment is very different but it still takes the same amount of coordination to get the shot off depending on what they're trying to get out of the experiment depends on what team comes together on that day so it can get very complicated and that's what makes it exciting to you know that you're working with different people and different experiments every day [Music] the energy storage section is full of oil which is processed by the system behind me the energy storage system contains all of the marks generators which actually store all of the energy that gets charged up when the machines about ready to fire and that pushes all the energy into the post forming section which is full water and when a laser trigger system fires it dumps all of that stored energy you know small compressed amount of time into the center section we have about 400 and some thousand gallons of water of the ionized water that's actually pumped through this system that goes through the storage tanks that are south of the facility it's about 600,000 gallons of oil that actually gets processed and after every shot and it goes out to storage tanks for the team can then go down and inspect the energy storage system I worked on the market generators those are the big machines in the oil and they had 60 capacitors on them each batch there's one hundred kilovolts and we had 36 we call the facilities bright and early in the morning around 6:00 a.m. they drain the machine the water takes about 30 minutes or so to drain the oil takes about a little bit over an hour we get into the water section first we do our maintenance in there and we get into the all section we do our routine maintenance in the all section as well if you ever visit the Z machine you can pretty much smell the oil in the air right away when you get down in there you get this full burst of the aroma of the oil floor is pretty slippery and you just have to watch out where you're stepping and then we have to climb this ladder 36 times all the way around the tank inspecting every single mark every single roll then they'll refill the machine you'll do that in preparation forever at the end of the day our job is to maintain the machine to keep the machine going to keep the machine running well we have 36 laser lines that have to be timed within nanoseconds of each other and if any of those don't function properly then the Machine doesn't function properly we have a team of 13 people we load all the hardware for the center of the machine everything from Diagnostics to the actual experiment itself [Music] the next day we come in we disassembled the machine man load everything out of the center then we refurbish the machines pretty hefty explosion happens in the middle of the scene so there's a person in there vacuuming all that debris up and there's another person in there that unbolting diagnostics and pulsing portions of the experiment that we're put in and then while that's happening someone's craning all that stuff out and then we'll have a team on the top side which we refurbishing the vitals the large pieces that were removed out of the center [Music] during that whole processors another team underneath of the machine essentially a load goes on the top of the Machine and load goes from the bottom and that completes the whole thing that connects in the middle and so they have to remove all the debris and hardware from the bottom as well any given day we can start a job where you're doing something brute force you're lifting heavy objects or I might be installing a target that is so delicate that if you breathe on it wrong it could collapse or destroy it so you go from the one extreme to the other any given day here there are days where I can spend up to eight hours in a tie back suit and we get in and out of those areas multiple times a day so I might go through eight or ten tie back suits in a day depending on the job and where we're at in the facility if I have to wear a pepper which is a completely enclosed helmet with a face guard and has a hose that goes down to a motor that supplies fresh air for me and then other times we'll just wear like a half face almost looks like a painter's mask with two cartridges so depending on the task it's extremely hot sweaty almost sounds like someone just got a mouthful mashed potatoes when they're talking we have a cylinder about ten feet in diameter at 16 feet tall that gets pumped down to a vacuum and that vacuum is so strong at the limb that sits on top of the machine our overhead 20-ton crane couldn't pull that lid off [Music] from the time the charge is complete till the time the shot goes off is a millisecond and there's a lot of moving parts that are all having to be timed perfectly in order for a shot to fire and it does the days are always different there's never such thing as the same day twice here we wouldn't be here if we knew all the answers you know there's still so much to learn and so little that we really do know about the universe around us that we need a machine like Z to be able to create the environments that allow us to test all of these different materials under these different conditions we try to build upon some science and develop the develop the foundation to do the next round of science that comes after that in many cases they may not even know what the next level of science is until we finish the work we have malady come up with more questions this is an amazing machine knowing that you're involved is something that could possibly help the United States of America it's really really exciting during complete tomorrow

Channel: Sandia National Labs

Views: 17,389

Rating: 4.8028169 out of 5

Keywords: Sandia National Laboratories, z machine, pulsed power, high energy density science, fusion, energy, science, national security

Id: gDLGjQVO2tY

Length: 9min 27sec (567 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 02 2020