Re: exploding wire

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: Gomez Addams <gomezaddams@xxxxxxxxx>


On Jun 15, 2006, at 12:11 PM, Tesla list wrote:

> Original poster: "Peter Terren" <pterren@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> Why do you need a low inductance to explode wire?

Just to explode wire at all, you don't.
It sorta depends on how dramatic an effect you're after.
There is a finite amount of time (very short) that the wire, and
later its vapor, is going to stay in one place.  If your goal is to
make super-bright "lightning bolt" flashes of plasma rather than
showers of sparks, you have very little time in which to dump all of
the caps' energy into the wire.

> Here I use the huge inductance of a 3kV winding of a 10KVA
> transformer in series and it still explodes uniformly although with
> a lot less shock and flash than a straight through shot. It may
> well be acting as a charging reactor to boost the voltage when the
> wire starts to disintegrate and separate allowing arcing to be
> maintained.

I'm pretty sure any energy stored in that reactor during the pulse is
going to be wasted because by the time the field in the reactor is
collapsing and dumping energy out again, the wire and arc channel
will be long gone.

Did you guys know that some folks (notably some Russians, I have a
white paper on it around somewhere) played around with making copper
vapor lasers via exploding wires for the pumping process?  Pretty
impressive, but not very practical, apparently.

 - B(G)L

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