Fully Vaporization of the Electrically Exploding Platinum Wires in Vacuum

Abstract

Experimental results characterizing the dynamics of the electrically exploding platinum wires without and with insulating coatings are presented. The insulating coatings substantially enhance the energy deposition with the overheating coefficients increasing from 0.5 for exploding bare platinum wires to 1.3 for exploding coated platinum wires with 2 cm in length. Although the homogeneous vaporized platinum wires can be realized in the exploding coated platinum wires, the exploding products exhibits a strong stochastic behavior. Most of the electrically exploding platinum wires produce inhomogeneous structures in energy deposition. Shortening the wire length further increases the specific energy deposition. The total deposited energy is high enough to vaporize the entire wire, while only a part of the wire is transformed into gaseous state. The percentage of vaporization increases almost linearly with the axial electrical field. With decrease of the wire length from 2 to 0.5 cm, the specific energy deposition increases from 2.6 to 14.9 eV/atom, and the percentage of vaporization improves from 52 to 92%.