Investigation of Current Transport in Wire Array Plasmas

Here, we present an experimental and computational study using planar wire arrays to examine the transport of magnetic fields in wire array plasmas. Two groups of wires are placed adjacent to each other at a fixed distance, while the local spacing between the wires is varied. Experimental results employing the electrical B-dot probes are compared with the simulations performed with the numerical results from the resistive MHD code, Gorgon, and show that the magnetic field generated by each pair of wires determines the amount of current advected with the plasma flow to the central axis.