Observations of multimode perturbation decay at non-accelerating, soft x-ray driven ablation fronts
- Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87544 (United States)
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California 95281 (United States)
Minimizing the growth of hydrodynamic instabilities is a fundamental design issue facing the achievement of thermonuclear ignition and burn with Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF). The thin capsules and extreme accelerations found in ICF make it an inherently unstable system primarily to Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) occurring at the ablation front. A potential mechanism by which perturbations at the outer capsule surface can be reduced lies in the already present ablative Richtmyer-Meshkov (RM) effect, which operates during the first shock transit of the ablator. At present, the available Equation of State (EOS) models predict a wide range of behavior for the ablative RM oscillations of multimode isolated defects on plastic (CH) capsules. To resolve these differences, we conducted experiments at the OMEGA Laser Facility [T. R. Boehly et al., Optics Comm. 133 (1997)] that measured the evolution of gaussian-shaped bumps driven by soft x-ray ablation from a halfraum. Shock speeds in the CH target were measured to reach 15 {mu}m/ns for halfraum radiation temperatures of 70 eV lasting for up to 7 ns. The evolution of gaussian-shaped bumps of different widths and heights were measured using on-axis x-ray radiography at up to 37 Multiplication-Sign magnification. Bumps with initial widths of 34 and 44 {mu}m FWHM were found to grow by 3 Multiplication-Sign their initial areal density and then saturate out to 6 ns due to lateral compression of the bump characteristic of the formation of a rippled shock front propagating into the solid target. Narrower 17 {mu}m FWHM bumps, on the other hand, grew by roughly 2 Multiplication-Sign followed immediately by a decrease back to initial values of areal density out to 7 ns, which largely agrees with both LEOS 5310 and SESAME 7592 EOS predictions. The difference in observed behavior suggests that high spatial frequency modes found in narrower bumps are needed to significantly affect the ablation front profile on shorter time scales.
- OSTI ID:
- 22072641
- Journal Information:
- Physics of Plasmas, Vol. 19, Issue 12; Other Information: (c) 2012 American Institute of Physics; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1070-664X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Experiments to measure ablative Richtmyer-Meshkov growth of Gaussian bumps in plastic capsules
Measurements of preheat and shock melting in Be ablators during the first few nanoseconds of a National Ignition Facility ignition drive using the Omega laser