Study on the discharge current waveform of aluminum wire electrical explosion in argon

Studying the discharge current waveform of wire electrical explosion is crucial to further analyzing the load characteristics including energy coupling efficiency. To this end, we drove the wire to approach the high voltage plate electrode using stepping motor. When ambient gas was broken down by electric field, discharge current was introduced to the wire, followed by the occurrence of wire explosion. In addition, based on the experimental scheme, a calculation method was proposed to determine the gas-gap length between two electrodes at the point of ambient gas breakdown during the motion of wire electrode. Also, discharge currents of the aluminum wire electrical explosion in argon were achieved by simulating the circuit model with the gap length obtained above. Finally, how the discharge currents were influenced by different experimental parameters (such as the charged voltage, the length of the wire, as well as the gas pressure) was analyzed. The results showed that the discharge currents calculated by our method agreed well with the experimental data by substituting the calculated gap length into the circuit model. As the charging voltages were improved from 20 kV to 28 kV, the peak value and the rise of rate for discharge currents increased by about 6 kA and 10 kA/μs, respectively. When the argon pressures increased from 0.1 MPa to 0.20 MPa, the breakdown times of metal vapor were put off from 1.5 μs to 2.1 μs.