Performance of a cylindrical curved convex crystal spectrograph for wire array Z-pinch experiments

X-ray spectrograph with a cylindrical curved convex crystal was designed for wire array Z-pinch experiments. Taking into consideration the effect of X-ray source size and rocking curve of crystal, ray tracing techniques were used for exploring the dispersion, spectral resolution, spatial resolution and their dependences on parameters of the spectrograph. The results show that size of X-ray source and its distance to the crystal influence spectral resolutions more than the other parameters. Increasing this distance improves the spectral resolution, but worsens spatial resolving power. A mica crystal spectrograph was then tested successfully on “Qiangguang-Ⅰ” pulsed power facility. Time integrated X-ray spectrographs of aluminum wire array Z-pinch plasmas were recorded.