Ever since I learned about Z Pinch (like sometime in May), I just had to demonstrate it. I saw a youtube video of someone doing just that but their video was like 15 seconds and they didnt use that much power, from the looks of it maybe 10 amps or so. I wanted to do the same thing but with a significant increase in power. I do have a youtube channel that Im working on so this will be a more behind the scenes look so Im not just putting out the same information.
So what is a Z Pinch, its pretty much using magnetic fields to compress electrically conducting mediums, like plasma or copper. Another example of this is when you crush a can with a coil of wire or, in my previous video, launching a coil off an aluminium plate. When a changing magnetic field is next to a conductive medium, it produces eddy currents in that medium that repels the magnetic field. In the example of crushing the can, the coil doesnt move so the magnetic force only acts on the can and forcing it inward. If the magnetic field is high enough, it will split in half.
So for the set up I used my DIY 30 KV power supply and a vacuum chamber from acrylic tubing. The video probably used some type of ionizing gas because the plasma they generated had a different color, I just used relatively low atmospheric pressure. The biggest difference is I just used 20 turns of 15 AWG wire while they used about 100 turns. I used bigger gauge because of the high surge of current, it just needed to handle it, but the coil was getting too big. I used 30 amps in the video below, but it didnt compress much.
Next I went for more current, about 10 KA, yep kiloamps from these capacitors. The problem is that it would only last for like 2 microseconds at peak then itll taper off, so I used my "high speed" camera that can record at 1000 fps.
I was able to get this image, I got exactly one frame. Better than nothing.
I had to try it again but with more energy, about 5 times more energy, 5000 Joules. I thought this would give me more frames but as you can see in the next video, I got 1 good frame and the rest was over saturated with the vaporized solder. I was limited on the attempts I could do with this amount of energy, but out of the attempts this was the only one that didnt have a bright light over-saturating the image at that critical moment. The multiple attempts are shown on my channel.
This is pretty awesome, but now I want to compress it even more. Im working on something to do just that.
Thanks for reading.