Recent Results of Electrical Explosion of Wires and Wires Arrays in Water and Glycerol

Spectroscopic studies of plasma formed inside a capillary and compressed by a shockwave (SW) generated by the underwater electrical explosion of a spherical wire array (SWA) showed density evolution to be in agreement with those of the model considering the adiabatic compression caused by the SW with a pressure predicted by HD modeling assuming uniformity of the converging SW.
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Studies of converging SW generated by underwater cylindrical wire arrays exploded on ns- and μs timescales, showed that that even in the case of initial azimuthal non-symmetry, the SW self-repairs in the final stages of its motion, leading to a uniform implosion down to the r=30μm.2 To increase liquid compression, the experiments and 1D HD simulations of electrical explosions of SWA arrays in water and glycerol for various stored energy of the pulse generator and sphere diameters were carried out. It was found that the convergence of the SW generated by an exploding array in glycerol is significantly faster than in water. Increasing the initially stored energy (for identical array diameters) or decreasing the sphere diameter (for identical stored energy) leads to an increase in parameters of compressed liquid in the vicinity of the implosion.3 These results are compared with the underwater electrical explosions of SWA on the sub-us-timescale. The time-of-flight of the SW convergence was found to be the same, despite the almost 4 times faster energy density deposition for the shorter timescale. This phenomenon is reproduced by HD modeling showing that the exploding wires' expansion on both timescales results in identical radii when the convergence of the SW becomes self-similar. Thus, to increase the parameters of the compressed water, instead of increasing the energy deposition rate, one must increase the stored energy.