| Designs of resistive electromagnets, known as Bitter magnets, able to sustain fields up to 10 T, and investigations of plasma discharge techniques to be used at such high fields, are presented in this dissertation. The Dusty Plasma Laboratory (DPL) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) has proposed experiments to research magnetized dusty plasmas (MDP) using micrometer-sized particles. The design criteria of the MDP experiments requires a magnet with minimum bore diameter of 15 cm and a sustained 10-T magnetic field for a minimum of 10 seconds. To satisfy these conditions, design techniques for constructing custom-made resistive, water-cooled Bitter magnets are presented in this dissertation. Analytic expressions used to design the Bitter magnet core are developed, and result in computationally fast electromagnetic and thermal solvers, which are integrated in optimization schemes used to minimize the magnet's electrical power. These solvers are used to design a 10 T Bitter magnet called the Adjustable Long Pulse High-Field Apparatus (ALPHA). An 11 MW Bitter magnet core design is evaluated for ALPHA. The evaluation is much faster and shows minimal difference when compared to calculations made with commercially available Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software. Using the new fast solvers and optimization routines, the Bitter Electromagnet Testing Apparatus (BETA)---a 1-T long pulsed magnet---is designed and constructed as a technical prototype of ALPHA. With its present power and cooling subsystems, BETA can achieve a long-pulsed magnetic field of 1 T in a 3-cm diameter bore. Experimental measurements of BETA show acceptable accuracy when compared to the analytical solvers presented here. The completion of BETA has advanced DPL magnet engineering, and has helped recognize challenges in ALPHA's eventual construction. At magnetic fields greater than approximately 2 T, plasma filamentation is known to hinder MDP experiments with traditional capacitively-coupled plasma (CCP) techniques used to create dusty plasmas. In preparation for the availability of high magnetic fields at DPL, inductively-coupled plasmas (ICP) are investigated at fields up to 1 T using BETA, and at fields up to 3.25 T using a superconducting magnet at the Magnetized Dusty Plasma eXperiment (MDPX) of Auburn University. The ICP experiments showed no signs of filamentation up to the available 3.25 T, and it is expected that no filamentation will appear at 10 T. |
