Bdot probes and Rogowski coils are used in the measurement of transient magnetic fields and currents, respectively. They both share the mechanism of creating an induced electromotive force response via Faraday’s law, which scales linearly with the pulsed magnetic field. High power capacitor direct current (DC) discharge systems release a single pulse of current that is both very high and very fast (≲1 ms). To capture these transient data and characterize these systems, high current tolerant and fast response time sensors are required. While these measuring devices have been well studied and utilized for almost 100 years, a comprehensive and detailed description of the custom design, calibration, and sensor fusion application of these tools for use in various pulsed DC capacitor value discharges is largely missing in the literature. Using robust analytical calculations, finite element analyses, and empirical methods, we have developed a sensor fusion protocol for current and magnetic field probes (with relative errors of ±13% and ±15%, respectively) for use in any geometry of high speed pulsed DC current calibrated capacitor discharge systems. This paper comprehensively outlines the design and sensor fusion methodologies that allow for the deployment of in-house built Bdot probes and Rogowski coils to a wide range of pulsed DC systems and demonstrates their use in a characteristic plasma environment.

Particle acceleration via magnetic reconnection is a fundamental process in astrophysical plasmas. Experimental architectures are able to confirm a wide variety of particle dynamics following the two-dimensional Sweet–Parker model, but are limited in their reproduction of the fan-spine magnetic field topology about three-dimensional (3-D) null points. Specifically, there is not yet an experiment featuring driven 3-D torsional magnetic reconnection. To move in this direction, this paper expands on recent work toward the design of an experimental infrastructure for inducing 3-D torsional fan reconnection by predicting feasible particle acceleration profiles. Solutions to the steady-state, kinematic, resistive magnetohydrodynamic equations are used to numerically calculate particle trajectories from a localized resistivity profile using well-understood laboratory plasma parameters. We confine a thin, 10 eV helium sheath following the snowplough model into the region of this localized resistivity and find that it is accelerated to energies of ${\approx }2$ keV. This sheath is rapidly accelerated and focused along the spine axis propagating a few centimetres from the reconnection region. These dynamics suggest a novel architecture that may hold promise for future experiments studying solar coronal particle acceleration and for technology applications such as spacecraft propulsion.

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