Simulation and assessment of ion kinetic effects in a direct-drive capsule implosion experiment

Abstract

The first simulations employing a kinetic treatment of both fuel and shell ions to model inertial confinement fusion experiments are presented, including results showing the importance of kinetic physics processes in altering fusion burn. A pair of direct drive capsule implosions performed at the OMEGA facility with two different gas fills of deuterium, tritium, and helium-3 are analyzed. During implosion shock convergence, highly non-Maxwellian ion velocity distributions and separations in the density and temperature amongst the ion species are observed. Diffusion of fuel into the capsule shell is identified as a principal process that degrades fusion burn performance.

References in corpus (4)

• Thermo-diffusion in inertially confined plasmas
• Species separation and modification of neutron diagnostics in inertial-confinement fusion
• Self-similar structure and experimental signatures of suprathermal ion distribution in inertial confinement fusion implosions
• Divergence preservation in the ADI algorithms for electromagnetics

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Ion Species Stratification Within Strong Shocks in Two-Ion Plasmas
• Hybrid-VPIC: an Open-Source Kinetic/Fluid Hybrid Particle-in-Cell Code
• An Eulerian Vlasov-Fokker-Planck Algorithm for Spherical Implosion Simulations of Inertial Confinement Fusion Capsules
• 2D Implosion Simulations with a Kinetic Particle Code