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This Defense Intelligence Agency reference document, dated 10 March 2010, covers inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion. It was produced in FY 2009 under the DIA's Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) program. The report focuses on work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and reviews IEC basics, experiments, theory and applications such as neutron sources, explosives detection and space propulsion. It concludes by proposing a breakeven experiment for p-11B fusion that uses a hydrogen plasma simulation.
“formation”17 pages
UNCLASSIFIED/ /F9A: 9FFIQl1k YE'lii 911k¥ ,o•~-~- ~~~-·--[--··-· I ,02J----'"-.::;;f,"-t-----f'------t------+------1 ,.o RAO•U"i Figure 1.2. Idealized Potential Structure Calculated by Hirsch for Monoenergetic Ions With No Angular Momentum. The nested virtual anodes and cathodes observed were originally termed "poissors" by the inventor, Philo Farnsworth. This is a very striking result that enthused these researchers to push on with this research. It, in effect, circumvents the Elmore et al. restriction by changing the potential well physics fundamentally. Of course in practice, there will be a spread in energy and angular momentum, so one would not expect more than a single potential well (vs. the infinite poissors of Farnsworth) to form in practice. The questions remaining then were (and still are): "How deep can such a well be in practice and how high an ion density can be trapped in it?" Various studies followed to study these issues more thoroughly using simulation codes. For example, Klevens and Black found in Reference 1.3 that: "A model of an electrostatic confinement device with ion injection has been developed which provides strong correlation between theory and experiment. The ion density profile was determined in position velocity throughout the two concentric grids by considering the processes of charge transfer and grid capture. A shallow-well approximation was incorporated in the model by assuming that ions encountering charge transfer in the inner grid region were accelerated up to a maximum of 5 percent of the applied grid voltage, and that the velocity of beam ions was constant in this region. Distribution functions in total energy and angular energy were developed for both ions and electrons. The ion distribution function consisted of three parts: a beam created at the anode and accelerated by the applied cathode voltage; a low-energy group produced by charge transfer near the cathode or in the center; and a intermediate-energy group resulting from charge-transfer reaction between anode and cathode. For each group the angular energy was assumed uniform up to a maximum value, which was different for each energy group. The electrons were assumed to be isotropic in velocity space, and to be uniformly distributed in total energy in the potential well in which they are trapped. The distribution functions were substituted into Poisson's equation and potential and density profiles for various 6 UNCLASSIFIED/ ;CF9A: 9FFIQl.«1k Wlili &••LY
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 72 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.