An empirical approach for parameters estimation of underwater electrical wire explosion

An electrical wire explosion is a complicated process consisting of several physical phenomena such as acoustic, optical, mechanical, electromagnetic, and thermal phenomena. The shock wave from such an explosion not only has a wide range of practical applications but it also plays an important role in analyzing the process of the explosion itself. In this paper, we propose an empirical approach to estimate the pressure and energy of the shock wave in an underwater electrical wire explosion. First, the discharge process is divided into several typical phases, and the deposited electrical energy, power, and time interval between adjacent phases are calculated. Then, the shock wave peak pressure is measured and the total mechanical energy is calculated, respectively. Finally, a multiparameter fitting method is adopted to deduce an empirical formula for peak pressure and shock wave energy, and the formula was the exponential function of the deposited electrical energy, power, and the discharge time interval. In this way, the shock wave pressure and energy are quickly and reliably estimated for given discharge parameters. As for 155 shots of the discharge experiment, the average relative error and the standard deviation of peak pressure are 8.45% and 5.47%, respectively, and those of the shock wave energy of are 12.2% and 11%, respectively. This empirical approach would be very useful in pulsed power device design and in the parameters involved in electrical wire matching.