Target acceleration by underwater electrical explosion of a wire array

Studies of the equation of states (EOS) of different materials at extreme pressures and densities are of great importance for various fields of research. A commonly used method to achieve extreme conditions is shock compression. Shock compression can be achieved by numerous techniques, one of them is the flyer plate which can be accelerated using either explosives, gas guns or pulse magnetic field gradients. In our presentation we will describe the experimental setup and results of accelerating flyer plates using a strong shock wave generated by the underwater electrical explosion of a planar wire array. Explosion of a planar Cu wire array was produced using a µs and sub-µs-timescale generators with stored energies of up to ~6 kJ, delivering to the array a current pulse with amplitudes of up to ∼500 kA with rise time of ~400 ns and ~1 µs, respectively. A Photonic Doppler Velocimetry (PDV) is applied for determining the velocity of a free moving target.