Capacitor voltage required to blow out field cage short and test consideration

Consider copper wire as short, what is required to evaporate it?

resistance of short

resistivity of Cu

Length of wire, gap between field cage stripes

Area of the wire

radius of wire

Heat of vaporization for copper

Atomic number of copper

density of copper

Energy to evaporate the wire

Try this capacitor value

time constant for discharge

This is reasonably short. Probably won't conduct heat away in this time.

Voltage required to give the desired energy

So, 34 volts on a 0.1 micro farad capacitor should evaporate the short if it is a copper wire.

We would like to test the process, but we are not going to find a 1 micron diameter copper wire so consider a test with a 20 micron tungsten wire.

Tungsten wire radius

resistivity of tungsten

resistance of tungsten wire

We will use gold plated tungsten for test so resistance will be less.

density of tungsten

heat of vaporization of tungsten

Atomic weight of tungsten

Energy required to evaporate the tungsten wire

You may not want to touch this to your hand, but it is not dangerous.

370 times as much energy required to blow away the tungsten compared to copper assumption

Volts required on the capacitor to evaporate the tungsten. This should be a good starting point for testing.

It would be good to do this test on a sample of aluminum field cage material. It may turn out that the aluminum gets removed instead of the tungsten. This however is OK. It still could solve the problem.

The test should be done with the probe contact system used for the resistance measurements because too much of the stored energy might be dissipated in the wires or the contact. The capacitance between stripes in on the order of 10 nF, so no need to worry about voltage division due to capacitance load.