Electrical and radiative properties of exploding wires

The work presented is stimulated by the use of an exploding wire plasma in a polythene capillary in electrothermal launchers. The capillary walls are initially heated by both conduction and radiation, however, at high temperatures, radiation becomes the dominant process causing ablation. For polythene, the 4.2 eV, C-C binding energy requires a threshold wavelength λ<300 nm for the ablation process. An exploding wire has traditionally been the radiation source for these purposes, and thus an experimental study of the factors that influence the radiation output is discussed