Radiative Properties of Argon Gas-Puff Implosions on COBRA

Gas-puff Z-pinch experiments were performed on the 1 MA COBRA pulsed power generator at Cornell University. The gas puffs were injected into the load region from a triple nozzle. The load region had an anode-cathode gap of 2.5 cm. The standard diagnostics on COBRA include time-integrated pinhole cameras, a time-integrated axially resolved x-ray spectrometer, filtered photo-conducting detectors, and time-gated XUV cameras. We will focus mainly on results from pinhole images and x-ray spectra from argon gas puffs including some with a SO2 dopant. The x-ray time-integrated pinhole images feature a tight axially uniform plasma column with a diameter of approximately 1 mm for argon gas implosion. The x-ray spectrometer used mica crystals (2d$=$19.84 {\AA}) and captured the argon K-shell radiation from different crystal reflections. A 1-D multi-zone argon and sulfur non-LTE kinetics code with radiation transport is used to model the K-shell emission for the purpose of inferring the plasma conditions and the interaction of gas from the inner annulus with the central jet.