Prediction of Achievable Energy Deposition for Vaporizing Foil Actuators

Abstract

A novel iterative analytic approach allowing for the prediction of energy deposition into Vaporizing Foil Actuators (VFA) is presented. Besides the process parameters of actuator geometry and pulse generator configuration, it takes into account the energy dependence of the resistivity as well as the rate dependence of the achievable energy deposition. This rate dependency is found experimentally for aluminum foils and subsequently used in the modeling. With an average deviation of less than 15% the predicted energy depositions are in acceptable accordance with the experiments, but only as long as homogeneous Joule heating can be assumed. The proposed model has thus the potential to ease the future VFA process design, e.g. for manufacturing applications.