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Experimental investigations on the electrical explosion of aluminum wire using negative polarity current in vacuum are presented. Current pulses with rise rates of 40 A/ns, 80 A/ns, and 120 A/ns are generated for investigating the influence of current rise rate on energy deposition. Experimental results show a significant increase of energy deposition into the wire before the voltage breakdown with the increase of current rise rate. The influence of wire dimension on energy deposition is investigated as well. Decreasing the wire length allows more energy to be deposited into the wire. The energy deposition of a 0.5 cm-long wire explosion is ∼2.5 times higher than the energy deposition of a 2 cm-long wire explosion. The dependence of the energy deposition on wire diameter demonstrates a maximum energy deposition of 2.7 eV/atom with a diameter of ∼18 μm. Substantial increase in energy deposition is observed in the electrical explosion of aluminum wire with polyimide coating. A laser probe is applied to construct the shadowgraphy, schlieren, and interferometry diagnostics. The morphology and expansion trajectory of exploding products are analyzed based on the shadowgram. The interference phase shift is reconstructed from the interferogram. Parallel dual wires are exploded to estimate the expansion velocity of the plasma shell.

With the help of thin dielectric coatings, corona free explosions were achieved in the region of about half a wire length (2 cm) for tungsten wires and nearly the whole wire length for platinum wires under a fast rising (46–170 A/ns) negative polarity current in vacuum. Expansion velocity of the tungsten gas was over 10 km/s. Current waveforms from exploding coated wires were similar to those from bare wires in the air including a current pause stage. Coated wires with different coating parameters had a similar joule energy deposition before voltage collapsed, but a quite different scenario in the region near the electrodes. The axial field under negative current was the main reason for the axial inhomogeneity of coated tungsten wires. Tungsten or platinum gases in the vaporized region were tightly encompassed by the dielectric coating, while gaps or probably low density gases, were observed between the coating and the edge of the dense wire core in the core-corona structure region.

We study the joint probability distribution of normal and tangential frictional forces in jammed granular media, Pµ(ft, fn), for various friction coefficient µ, especially when µ = ∞. A universal scaling law is found to collapse the data for µ = 0 to ∞ demonstrating a link between force distribution Pµ(ft, fn) and average coordination number, z µ c . The results determine z µ c for a finite friction coefficient, extending the constraints counting argument of isostatic granular packing to finite frictional packings.