Characteristics of implosion and radiation for aluminum planar wire array z-pinch at 1.5 MA

Planar wire arrays Z pinches were carried out on Qiangguang generator (1.5 MA, 100 ns). Loads with varied row widths (6–24 mm) and wire numbers (10–34) were employed in the experiments. The implosion dynamics of planar wire arrays has been studied. Meanwhile, the changes of the implosion time, radiation yield and power with array mass, inter-wire gap, and array width were investigated. The images of a soft X-ray camera exhibit that the trailing mass, precursor column, and R-T instability exist during the implosion phase, and when m = 0 maybe accompanied with m = 1, instability will rapidly develop after stagnation. The implosion trajectories show that loads will implode by the snowplow mode and about 50% of total initial array mass will participate in the final implosion. The maximum total X-ray energy is 22 kJ with a power of 630 GW, while the maximum K-shell yield is 3.9 kJ with a power of 158 GW. Experiments with different planar wire arrays show that the value of mPD02 (the product of line mass and squared width) is the critical factor which affects the implosion time and the X-ray products of the wire arrays. The optimum value of mPD02 should be in the range of 200–400 μgcm and the inter-wire gap should be less than 1 mm.