Verification and validation adventures in simulating megagauss-magnetic-field-induced plasma formation on thickwire metallic surfaces

Abstract

We discuss various verification and validation issues in computational modeling of a series of aluminum "thickwire," i.e., rod, experiments that have been conducted on the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) Zebra generator (2 TW, 1 MA, 100 ns). These conceptually simple experiments involve multi-megagauss surface magnetic fields and have proven to be exceptionally rich in physical phenomena. The experiments also present severe computational challenges. We show that with a proper choice of equation-of-state and resistivity models Eulerian simulations can reproduce many of the observations to a reasonable degree. We also show that Eulerian and Lagrangian computations agree only with serious caveats, leading to the question of whether or not the computations are satisfactorily verified.