X-ray radiation from puff-on-wire implosions on the COBRA generator

Substantial progress has been made in developing plasma radiation sources from Z-pinch implosions. University pulsed power machines provide a cost effective platform to study alternative mechanisms of producing x-rays in exploratory experiments that may provide guidance in search of further improvements on the larger machines. Radiation from puff-on-wire implosions were studied by Chuvatin et al. [1] and Wessel et al. [2]. We report recent observations and modeling of puff-on-wire implosions using the 1 MA COBRA generator in the long pulse mode. The gas puff used neon, argon, or krypton and the wire material was either copper or manganin 290 (84% Cu, 12% Mn, 4% Ni). The diagnostics include time-integrated pinhole cameras, time-integrated axially resolved spectra, multiple filtered PCDs and Si-diodes, and time-gated XUV cameras. X-ray radiation from the gas puff and K-alpha lines from wire material was detected and the radiation pulse was reproducible. A 1-D multi-zone non-LTE kinetics code with radiation transport will be used to model the radiation to infer the plasma conditions.