Review of Wire Electrical Explosion Phenomena

With the high pulsed drive current, the metallic wires will explode by joule heating. At the same time, different physical and chemical effects will appear. Up to now, the wire electrical explosion phenomena have application in many fields, such as industry, agriculture, new material production, and nuclear fusion. We review the history of study on wire electrical explosion and the application in different research areas, present physical phenomena based on different current pulsed, and propose a classification method of wire electrical explosion phenomena. For different energy and pulsed rise time of wire deposition, the wire explosion phenomena can be part of two modes, under-heat mode and overheat mode. In the mode of overheat, the wire explosion can be part of low temperature plasma and hot plasma. The low temperature plasma has different application characteristics in different medium environment. Furthermore, we present the state-of-the-art of wire explosion parameters diagnosis method and numerical method, and discuss the research problem and hot and development direction. © 2019, High Voltage Engineering Editorial Department of CEPRI. All right reserved.