Two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic studies of implosion modes of nested wire array z-pinches

Abstract

Implosion dynamics of nested wire arrays in (r, θ) geometry was studied with two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic (2D MHD) simulations. Three different implosion modes are obtained by just changing the wire number of the outer array, when the other conditions, such as the initial radius, length, mass of each array, the wire number of the inner array, and the discharge voltage waveform, are fixed. Simulation results show that the effect of discrete wires, which cannot be described by the thin shell inductive model, will influence the distribution of current between the outer and inner arrays at the early stage, and the discrepancy between results from MHD and thin shell model increases with the interwire gap of the outer array.