Behavior of exploding wires

Summary form only given. Exploding wire is performed by rapidly heating the wire to vaporization temperature with a high current pulse flowing through the wire. Exploding wires have found many applications among which are the opening switches named fuses in the circuits for inductive energy storage, the discharge loads of X-pinch or Z-pinches, namely wire array Z-pinches, and the production of nanopowders. The behavior of exploding wires for nanopowder production was studied by experiments and numerical simulation. In experiments, the evolution of the exploding wire was recorded by taking time- resolved pictures of the explosion with a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. From the interferograms the electron density and the expansion speed of the metallic vapor from the exploding wire can be deduced. The shock wave in front of the expanding wire could be visualized. In numerical simulation, the electrical behavior of exploding wires was obtained by solving nonlinear differential equation describing the discharge circuit. For the metal wires of high conductivity and low sublimation heat, such as Copper, Aluminum, Gold and Silver, the circuit simulation could be well conducted based on the resistivity model developed by Tucker1 in which the resisitivity was expressed with the explicit functions of specific action, i.e., p = f(g) . For the metals such as Titanium and Zinc of their resistivity anomalously changing, i.e., decreasing rather than increasing, with the liquid heating, the circuit simulation of the exploding wires could be performed using the implicit relationship between p and g that is read out point by point from the experimentally measured curve. With the circuit simulation the rate of the energy deposition in the exploding wires before the explosion could be obtained, which is helpful to choose right experimental conditions for possible overheat that is desirable for getting smaller nanopowders produced by exploding wires.