Investigating the influence of the wire-arrays’ electrical parameters on the load current of the z-pinch drivers

Wire arrays are the typical loads which have been widely used in z-pinch research studies. When a large pulsed power accelerator is designed, the electrical parameters of the z-pinch loads including the inductance and the resistance (or the equivalent resistance) must be considered. In this paper, the inductance and the resistance of the single planar wire arrays were introduced from the experiments carried out on a Qiangguang accelerator (1.5 MA, 100 ns). The lumped-element circuit model of the wire array was established using the PSPICE software, and the model was verified by comparing the simulation results with the experimental results. The influence of the electrical parameters on the accelerator’s driving current is investigated. It shows that the inductance affects the rising edge and the peak value of the current, while the resistance mainly affects the current waveform after the stagnation of the wire array pinch load. The inductance model based on the zero-dimensional equation is compared with the inductance model based on the experimental data, and the result shows that the two different inductance models give almost the same pinch current. It can be concluded that the zero-dimensional model is valid in circuit simulation to investigate the peak current of the designed z-pinch accelerator.