Experiment to Form and Characterize a Section of a Spherically Imploding Plasma Liner
arXiv:1710.00149 · doi:10.1109/TPS.2017.2779421
Abstract
We describe an experiment to form and characterize a section of a spherically imploding plasma liner by merging six supersonic plasma jets that are launched by newly designed contoured-gap coaxial plasma guns. This experiment is a prelude to forming a fully spherical imploding plasma liner using many dozens of plasma guns, as a standoff driver for plasma-jet-driven magneto-inertial fusion. The objectives of the six-jet experiments are to assess the evolution and scalings of liner Mach number and uniformity, which are important metrics for spherically imploding plasma liners to compress magnetized target plasmas to fusion conditions. This paper describes the design of the coaxial plasma guns, experimental characterization of the plasma jets, six-jet experimental setup and diagnostics, initial diagnostic data from three- and six-jet experiments, and the high-level objectives of associated numerical modeling.
arXiv comment11 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in the April 2018 IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci. special issue on plenary and invited talks from the 2017 International Conference on Plasma Science
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Cited by in corpus (12)
- Incorporating Kinetic Effects on Nernst Advection in Inertial Fusion Simulations
- Retrospective of the ARPA-E ALPHA fusion program
- Magnetized Plasma Target for Plasma-Jet-Driven Magneto-Inertial Fusion
- Experimental Measurements of Ion Heating in Collisional Plasma Shocks and Interpenetrating Supersonic Plasma Flows
- Experimental characterization of a section of a spherically imploding plasma liner formed by merging hypersonic plasma jets
- Simulation Study of the Influence of Experimental Variations on the Structure and Quality of Plasma Liners
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