Effects of circuit inductance on electrical and shock wave characteristics at underwater wire explosion

Circuit inductance is an important parameter at underwater electrical wire explosion (UEWE) experiments as it closely relates to the energy deposition rate to the load wire. In this study, the circuit inductance was varied within a wide range from 1.55 μH to 93.2 μH by inserting inductive coils to study its effects on electrical and shock wave (SW) characteristics at UEWE. Experimental results showed that UEWEs using thinner wires were less affected by the increase of circuit inductance and the SW peak pressure several-cm away from the wire is not sensitive to the increase of circuit inductance if properly choosing the diameter of load wire: the maximum SW peak pressure obtained with varied diameter (constant energy storage and wire length) only saw a decrease of 30% as the circuit inductance increased by 60 times from 1.55 μH (0.3 mm diameter, 19 MPa) to 93.2 μH (0.2 mm diameter, 13 MPa). Hydrodynamic calculations were used to explain the experimental results. These results indicated that for a practical UEWE system, the energy storage can be far away from the load while keeping an acceptable loss of the capability of generating strong SWs, which greatly improves the flexibility of system designing for example by enabling much larger energy storage for certain harsh working environments.