Collisional–radiative simulations of a supersonic and radiatively cooled aluminum plasma jet

•LTE, NLTE steady state and time dependent models.•NLTE optically thin and thick models.•Microscopic properties of supersonic radiatively cooled jet.•Influence of those kinetics models in the calculations of these properties.

A computational investigation based on collisional–radiative simulations of a supersonic and radiatively cooled aluminum plasma jet is presented. The jet, both in vacuum and in argon ambient gas, was produced on the MAGPIE (Mega Ampere Generator for Plasma Implosion Experiments) generator and is formed by ablation of an aluminum foil driven by a 1.4 MA, 250 ns current pulse in a radial foil Z-pinch configuration. In this work, population kinetics and radiative properties simulations of the jet in different theoretical approximations were performed. In particular, local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE), non-LTE steady state (SS) and non-LTE time dependent (TD) models have been considered. This study allows us to make a convenient microscopic characterization of the aluminum plasma jet.