Documents / Report
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.
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Figure 4.4. Sketch of Two Opposite Limits of the Beam-Maxwellian Equilibrium. The solid line
corresponds to a case 1n which the Maxwellian population is dominant; the dashed line corresponds to
a case in which the beam contribution is dominant.
In summary, unlike the original Nevins "calculations", the subsequent Chacon, et al.
results are quite encouraging but leave open the issue of whether or not satisfactory
deep potential wells can be created. To pursue this issue further, Ivan Tzonev et al.
considered well formation with emphasis on angular momentum effects (Reference
4.4). Earlier studies had assumed that very low angular momentum (zero in the ideal
case) is necessary to achieve a potential well structure capable of trapping energetic
ions. In contrast, Tzonev et al. considered high-current ion beams as having a
significant angular-momentum spread. The results found were positive, and this is
important due to the need to create wide wells to provide a large reaction volume,
hence larger power IECs. Before discussing this work, some definitions for the potential
well structure will be reviewed.
POTENTIAL WELL STRUCTURE
The potential structures are called double potentials because two extremisms (''outer"
and "inner" wells) are observed in the plots of electrostatic potential versus IEC radius,
excluding the real cathode grid minimum. A schematic representation of a typical
calculated potential from Tzonev's work is shown in Figure 4.5. These cases are
different from Hirsch's ideal case described in Section I, where multiple potential wells
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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.