Direct-drive scaling for high gain
- Univ. of Rochester, NY (United States)
The top priority of the U.S. Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) program was defined by the 1990 National Academy of Sciences` (NAS) review committee [1] to be: {open_quotes}The expeditious demonstration of ignition and gain...{close_quotes} To attain this objective, the ICF program is directed toward an experimental and theoretical program with the intermediate goal of defining ignition-capsule physics issues and glass-layer driver technology advances necessary to construct a National ignition facility (NIF). The NAS Committee concluded that the direct-drive approach to ICF could potentially provide higher gain at lower incident energy than the mainline indirect-drive approach and should be vigorously pursued. It placed a high priority on the construction of the OMEGA Upgrade facility at the University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) to validate the direct-drive approach for possible use on NIF and to provide key data to assure the success of NIF. The OMEGA Upgrade laser system is presently under construction and will provide a unique direct-drive experimental program to be carried out on the OMEGA Upgrade is to study the physics of hot-spot formation under near-ignition conditions (ignition scaling), using capsules whose hydrodynamic behavior scales similarly to that of high-gain capsules. The program objectives are to demonstrate a convergence ratio >20, an ion temperature of 2 to 3 keV, and a total fuel areal density greater than 0.2g/cm{sup 2} with capsules whose Raleigh-Taylor growth factors are in excess of 500.
- DOE Contract Number:
- FC03-92SF19460
- OSTI ID:
- 549182
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-950264--
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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