High-Quality Implosion of Overmassed $Z$ -Pinch in the Experiment With Magnetocumulative Generator

This paper presents the results of the experiment with an overmassed wire-array $Z$ -pinch load that is powered by a current pulse (amplitude ~4.3 MA and rise time $\sim 0.9~\mu \text{s}$ ) from a multidisk magnetocumulative generator. Interesting feature of the experimentally recorded soft X-ray (SXR) pulse is short (~10 ns) duration at a microsecond current rise time with total energy of several hundreds of kilojoules. Obtained results are the evidence of high-quality implosion of the current-carrying plasma. The 2-D magnetohydrodynamic code FLUX-rz was used for the numerical simulation and analysis of the obtained results. The calculations indicated that only ~30% of the initial load mass took part in the SXR generation. The main peculiarities of the overmassed $Z$ -pinch implosion are discussed in this paper.

I. Introduction

Intense flux generation of the soft X-ray (SXR) as a result of implosion of cylindrical multiwire arrays has been investigated at RFNC-VNIIEF for a long time. These systems are powered by explosive current sources. A current pulse with amplitude of ~14 MA was obtained with an imploding load for a Russian record of experiments with multidisk magnetocumulative generators (MCGs). This was a generation of the SXR pulse with the energy of ~650 kJ and the duration of ~55 ns [1].