Inertial Confinement Fusion- a brief Introduction
Posted: Fri Sep 22, 2017 12:21 pm
Hello everyone, I wanted to share some brief info about the following topic:
Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) is an application involving shock waves, and is under deep research in the US. The ICF program is a part of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and supports the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) in providing experimental capabilities in High Energy Density Physics (HEDP). The ICF process involves a fuel target that is heated and compressed to initiate nuclear fusion. When high energy laser, electrons or ion beams hit the outer layer of the target, shock waves are generated. They travel inward thereby heating and compressing the fuel at the center and causing fusion reactions. Researchers have been trying to study the effects of hydrodynamic instabilities that accelerate the growth of non-uniformities on the target surface that can reduce the final compression and quench the ignition process. Instabilities in a system refers to infinitesimal velocity or density perturbances or any effect on the state of the system that is amplified by base or global forces and thus leads to growth of these infinitesimal perturbations to finite size as a result of impulse forces across the perturbed biomaterial interface. The system may depart from the initial state and may never return to that state. The Rayleigh-Taylor (RTI), Richtmeyer-Meshkov (RMI) and Kelvin-Helmholtz (KHI) instabilities are predominant and common in most hydrodynamic situations.
For those who might be interested can refer to this paper for more details and other good references on ICF:
R. Betti and A. Hurricane, “Inertial-confinement fusion with lasers,” Nat. Phys., vol. 12, no. May, pp. 435–448, 2016.
Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) is an application involving shock waves, and is under deep research in the US. The ICF program is a part of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and supports the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) in providing experimental capabilities in High Energy Density Physics (HEDP). The ICF process involves a fuel target that is heated and compressed to initiate nuclear fusion. When high energy laser, electrons or ion beams hit the outer layer of the target, shock waves are generated. They travel inward thereby heating and compressing the fuel at the center and causing fusion reactions. Researchers have been trying to study the effects of hydrodynamic instabilities that accelerate the growth of non-uniformities on the target surface that can reduce the final compression and quench the ignition process. Instabilities in a system refers to infinitesimal velocity or density perturbances or any effect on the state of the system that is amplified by base or global forces and thus leads to growth of these infinitesimal perturbations to finite size as a result of impulse forces across the perturbed biomaterial interface. The system may depart from the initial state and may never return to that state. The Rayleigh-Taylor (RTI), Richtmeyer-Meshkov (RMI) and Kelvin-Helmholtz (KHI) instabilities are predominant and common in most hydrodynamic situations.
For those who might be interested can refer to this paper for more details and other good references on ICF:
R. Betti and A. Hurricane, “Inertial-confinement fusion with lasers,” Nat. Phys., vol. 12, no. May, pp. 435–448, 2016.