Study of Physical Processes and Products in Electrical Explosion of Porous Materials

The electrical explosion refers to that when a high-voltage power supply to provide high-power electric pulse into a fine wire, due to the Joule heat effect, the wire rapidly experiences phase transitions, through the solid state, liquid state, gas state, and plasma state during the discharge. This process converts electrical energy into plasma energy, electromagnetic radiation energy, optical radiation energy, shock waves, etc., and accompanied by a strong flash and violent explosion sound. In this work, the exploding wire load is replaced by different porous conductive materials such as carbon foam, copper foam, iron foam, etc. A platform has been adopted for researching electrical physical characteristics of different porous materials, along with the plasma/fluid dynamics. A radial jet spray structure was designed, so that the products generated from the electrical explosion of porous foam materials were ejected through a pre-set jet port to reach the silicon wafer for collection. Specifically, an oscilloscope was used to record the current and voltage during this process and to analyze the electrical characteristics. A high-speed video camera was used to record the explosion dynamics. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy spectrometry (EDS) were used to characterize the micro-morphology and specific distribution of the coatings collected on the wafers.