A Study of Thin Foil Explosion

• Published in: IEEE transactions on plasma science Vol. 46; no. 11; pp. 3741 - 3745
• Main Authors: Shelkovenko, Tatiana A., Pikuz, Sergey A., Tilikin, Ivan N., Romanova, Vera M., Mishin, Sergey N., Atoyan, Levon, Hammer, David A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.11.2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: 70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY; Current density; Dependence; Explosions; Flat foil; foil explosion; Foils; Generators; liner; plasma pinch; Radiography; Soft x rays; Spatial resolution; Temporal resolution; Voltage measurement; Wires; X-ray imaging; X-ray radiography
• ISSN: 0093-3813; 1939-9375
• DOI: 10.1109/TPS.2018.2852063

The explosion of thin flat and cylindrical foils has been studied on the BIN (270 kA, 100-ns rise time), XP (500 kA, 100-ns rise time), and COBRA (1.0 MA, 100-ns rise time) pulsed-power generators. On all three generators, hybrid and standard 4-wire X-pinches were used to provide soft X-ray radiography with better than 3-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\mu \text{m} </tex-math></inline-formula> spatial resolution and 1-ns temporal resolution. This enabled a detailed exploration of the dependence of the exploded structure of the foil on its initial structure and the current density flowing through it. With sufficient current density in the foils, bubbles were observed to form in the center of the foils; the higher the current density, the larger is the bubble diameters.