Numerical simulations of liner implosions over plasma injection vanes
- Phillips Lab., Kirtland AFB, NM (United States)
The Phillips Laboratory has long been involved in the investigations of solid liner implosions. Recently, effort has been directed towards imploding liners on hydrogen working fluids. Using a coaxial gun, the hydrogen plasma is injected into the payload volume through a series of vanes. Numerical simulations have been performed to determine the physical effects of the vanes on the liner, and to further determine the amount of a magnetic diffusion that occurs as the liner passes over the vanes. Previously, simulations which were run using a purely Lagrangian mesh have suffered from tangling in geometries and situations which were not one-dimensional, and numerical diffusion in Eulerian and arbitrary meshes has led to unphysical smearing of interesting physical quantities early in the simulated implosions. The proposed experiments were simulated with the Mach2 code, a 2 1/2-dimension MHD ALE code that has recently been modified to handle multiple materials. An interface tracker using a fractional volume method is used to resolve material interfaces on a sub-zone size. This greatly reduces the numerical diffusion which commonly occurs in a purely or partially Eulerian mesh and preserves the huge (many orders of magnitude) discontinuities in density and specific energy between the working fluid, liner, and vacuum during the implosion. Three situations have been investigated with the Mach2 code. In the first, a liner is imploded with an initial density perturbation, and the resultant Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities are examined. In the second situation, a liner is imploded onto a step. The severing of the liner and the axial propagation of the disturbance through the liner is studied. Finally, the liner is imploded over a gap, and the diffusion of the driving magnetic field under the liner during the transit time over the gap is examined.
- OSTI ID:
- 63083
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-940604-; ISBN 0-7803-2006-9; TRN: IM9527%%134
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 1994 Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) international conference on plasma science, Santa Fe, NM (United States), 6-8 Jun 1994; Other Information: PBD: 1994; Related Information: Is Part Of 1994 IEEE international conference on plasma science; PB: 252 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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