Primary experimental results of wire-array Z-pinches on PTS

The Primary Test Stand (PTS) developed at the China Academy of Engineering Physics is a multiterawatt pulsed power driver, which can deliver a ∼10 MA, 70 ns rise-time (10%-90%) current to a short circuit load and has important applications in Z-pinch driven inertial confinement fusion and high energy density physics. In this paper, primary results of tungsten wire-array Z-pinch experiments on PTS are presented. The load geometries investigated include 15-mm-tall cylindrical single and nested arrays with diameter ranging from 14.4-26.4 mm, and consisting of 132∼276 tungsten wires with 5∼10 μm in diameter. Multiple diagnostics were fielded to determine the characteristics of x-ray radiations and to obtain self-emitting images of imploding plasmas. X-ray power up to 80 TW with ∼3 ns FWMH is achieved by using nested wire arrays. The total x-ray energy exceeds 500 kJ and the peak radiation temperature is about 150 eV. Typical velocity of imploding plasmas goes around 3∼5×107 cm/s and the radial convergence rat...