Instability growth for magnetized liner inertial fusion seeded by electro-thermal, electro-choric, and material strength effects

Journal Article · Thu Oct 15 04:00:00 EDT 2015 · Physics of Plasmas

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4932328· OSTI ID:22486439

Pecover, J. D.; Chittenden, J. P. ^[1]

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1. The Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies, The Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College, London SW7 2AZ (United Kingdom)

A critical limitation of magnetically imploded systems such as magnetized liner inertial fusion (MagLIF) [Slutz et al., Phys. Plasmas 17, 056303 (2010)] is the magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor (MRT) instability which primarily disrupts the outer surface of the liner. MagLIF-relevant experiments have showed large amplitude multi-mode MRT instability growth growing from surface roughness [McBride et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 135004 (2012)], which is only reproduced by 3D simulations using our MHD code Gorgon when an artificially azimuthally correlated initialisation is added. We have shown that the missing azimuthal correlation could be provided by a combination of the electro-thermal instability (ETI) and an “electro-choric” instability (ECI); describing, respectively, the tendency of current to correlate azimuthally early in time due to temperature dependent Ohmic heating; and an amplification of the ETI driven by density dependent resistivity around vapourisation. We developed and implemented a material strength model in Gorgon to improve simulation of the solid phase of liner implosions which, when applied to simulations exhibiting the ETI and ECI, gave a significant increase in wavelength and amplitude. Full circumference simulations of the MRT instability provided a significant improvement on previous randomly initialised results and approached agreement with experiment.

• OSTI ID: 22486439
• Journal Information: Physics of Plasmas, Journal Name: Physics of Plasmas Journal Issue: 10 Vol. 22; ISSN PHPAEN; ISSN 1070-664X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY
AMPLITUDES
CURRENTS
INERTIAL CONFINEMENT
INERTIAL FUSION DRIVERS
JOULE HEATING
MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMICS
RAYLEIGH-TAYLOR INSTABILITY
ROUGHNESS
SOLIDS
SURFACES
TEMPERATURE DEPENDENCE
THREE-DIMENSIONAL CALCULATIONS
WAVELENGTHS