Reducing deuterium-tritium ice roughness by electrical heating of the saturated vapor

Conference · Fri Jun 14 04:00:00 EDT 1996

OSTI ID:283673

Mapoles, E R ^[1]; Sater, J D; Monsler, E ^[2]; Pipes, J ^[3]

---

1. Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (United States)
2. Schafer (W.J.) Associates, Inc., Livermore, CA (United States)
3. Allied-Signal Inc., Livermore, CA (United States)

High gain targets for inertial confinement fusion (ICF) contain a layer of deuterium-tritium (DT) ice which surrounds a volume of DT gas in thermal equilibrium with the solid. The roughness of the cryogenic fuel layer inside of ICF targets is one of the sources of imperfections which cause implosions to deviate from perfect one dimensional performance. Experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have shown that applying a heat flux across the inner surface of a hydrogen layer such as that inside an ICF target reduces the intrinsic roughness of the surface. We have developed a technique to generate this heat flux by applying and electric field to the DT vapor in the center of these shells. This vapor has a small but significant conductivity due to ionization caused by beta decay of tritium in the vapor and the solid. We describe here experiments using a 1.15 GHz cavity to apply an electric field to frozen DT inside of a sapphire test cell. The cell and cavity geometry allows visual observation of the frozen layers.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: W-7405-ENG-48
• OSTI ID: 283673
• Report Number(s): UCRL-JC--124253; CONF-9606229--16; ON: DE96014130
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY
DEUTERIUM
DEUTERIUM TARGET
ELECTRIC CONDUCTIVITY
ICE
INERTIAL CONFINEMENT
LASER TARGETS
MICROWAVE HEATING
ROUGHNESS
TRITIUM
TRITIUM TARGET
VAPORS