7.2 Mass Driver Two Results The following results and observations are now made concerning tests performed with Mass Driver Two. Details can be found in Chapters 2.1, 3.3, 4.5, and 6.2. a) The total mass driver system (accelerator, decelerator, optical sensors, SCR and SCR trigger circuitry, and recharging subsystems) turned out to be considerably more complicated than one first expected. b) The additional tasks of developing ohmic buckets and their power supplies, injector, and instrumentation and control circuitry added significantly to the work load and delayed full scale testing by more than a year. c) The recharge system by itself added a year to the development time. It was very complicated and prone to failure initially, primarily SCR burn out, but after considerable time of debugging it was made to work reliably. d) The two phase push pull drive circuit was complicated to operate. If only one of ther SCR's failed, the other three drive coils would be rendered useless for that drive coil firing. With an SCR burn out (if taken out of the circuit by a fuse) the resulting drive current waveform would be lengthened thus adding a problem of overlapping drive current waveforms on the next firing. e) Unloaded drive coil firing efficiencies were between 52% and 58%. This includes all losses in sector capacitor, feeder strips, SCR's, drive coils, and connections. With better designs this could be improved. f) Recharge of the sector capacitor turned out to be 72% efficient. It too could have been improved with lower loss sector capacitors,
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