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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.
“G. A.”21 pages
UNCLASSIFIED//509 OFFlliIIIL ~81!! &HE I • ,.\--- ·~ \' . ' ''' Figure 1.3. Discharge Modes in Gridded Devices Identified by Miley Figure 1.4. Photo of Star Mode Seen Through a Reaction Vessel Port Window In summary, the basic IEC approach is to create a potential well through electrostatic confinement of one of the plasma species in a dynamic (inertial) configuration. "Inertial" effects associated with dynamic motion of the confined species are essential to avoid plasma losses predicted for systems by Earnshaw (as noted earlier). The two primary approaches can be termed, "ion injected" or "electron injected", the "injected" species being the one forming the potential well. In order to maintain the well, the second species brought in with the injected one must not completely neutralize the plasma, i.e., the IEC plasma is inherently "quasi-neutral". This well then provides trapping and convergence of the ion "streaming" towards the center of the trap region, forming a dense fusing plasma there. For a power reactor the objective is to obtain ion beam-beam collisions in this central core. For neutron/proton production satisfactory reaction rates can come from beam background collisions. However, this scaling with injected current would require excessive input power for a practical power-producing unit. Thus beam-beam scaling of the reaction rate as the current squared (or higher powers as noted earlier may be possible due to nonlinear effects) is essential. The vision of a power reactor seeks a "zero" background pressure, thus generally involves an external ion source with acceleration into the trap at ultra low pressure to obtain beam-beam collisions. As described earlier, this changes the details of the physics just discussed for an ideal "zero" background pressure device. The issue of whether the trap should be formed by ion injection or by "digging a well" with electrons remains open, but involves stability and reaction volume (focusing) optimization issues. Since the discussion to here has been largely on gridded devices, we next briefly review some other approaches: the Bussard HEPS concept, the Barnes Nebel Penning trap, the Nebel POPS device, and the Miley ion injected device. 9 UNCLASSIFIED/ /F81it 8FFI1il.«1k W&liii SUIL¥
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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.