TUNGSTEN WIRE-ARRAY Z-PINCH EXPERIMENTS AT 200 TW AND 2 MJ

Here Z, a 60 TW/5 MJ electrical accelerator located at Sandia National Laboratories, has been used to implode tungsten wire-array Z pinches. These arrays consisted of large numbers of tungsten wires (120-300) w ith wire diameters of 7.5 to 15 mu m placed in a symmetric cylindrical array. The experiments used array diameters ranging from 1.75 to 4 cm and lengths from 1 to 2 cm. A 2 cm long, 4 cm diam tungsten array con sisting of 240, 7.5 mu m diam wires (4.1 mg mass) achieved an x-ray po wer of similar to 200 TW and an x-ray energy of nearly 2 MJ. Spectral data suggest an optically thick, Planckian-like radiator below 1000 eV . One surprising experimental result was the observation that the tota l radiated x-ray energies and x-ray powers were nearly independent of pinch length. These data are compared with two-dimensional radiation m agnetohydrodynamic code calculations. (C) 1998 American Institute of P hysics.