Documents / Report

Defense Intelligence Reference Document Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion

Defense Intelligence Agency · 72 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

  • p. 8 …This is important for long run times since 10n bombardment of the grids, hence grid wire…
  • p. 9 …This time can be restated in terms of the number of ion recirculations in the IEC…
  • p. 15 …This work and others on the small gridded systems at that time showed several important problems…
  • p. 17 …interesting concept is the idea of ion focusing, either in space or time, or some other…
  • p. 18 …confinement time for aneutronic fusion. This assumes, however, very precise control is maintained over the energy…
  • p. 23 …By selecting the pulse width to match or exceed the ion confinement time, typically order of…
  • p. 27 …This is the approach used at the UIUC. However, introduction of the source into the configuration…
  • p. 30 …The second jet would serve the integration purpose of the platform without having to expend time…
  • p. 35 …The issue then is how to achieve adequate confinement times. The approach being pursued at UIUC…
  • p. 36 …step in a timely fashion, however. The Dipole Assisted IEC (DaIEC) The dipole assisted IEC DaIEC…
  • p. 38 …in the current experiment. It is found that electron density increases about 17 times more than…
  • p. 41 …Namely, the time scale for collisional degradation of the beam-like ion distribution function is crucial…
  • p. 42 …would homogenize the speed within the ion beam a~er some time, making the speed difference…
  • p. 43 …1) The electrostatic well is deep enough (Eo > 100 kV); 2) Ion confinement time is long…
  • p. 44 …The source to sink issue noted several times here can be explained as follows. Two opposite…
  • p. 49 …The time convergence test suggests that employing the largest time step compatible with accuracy in a…
  • p. 50 …When an ion beam is hot, the waves excited by the instability are ion acoustic type…
  • p. 51 …used an analytical model of charge- exchange collisions in the IEC plasma to include ion time…
  • p. 53 …Nevins, Can inertial electrostatic confinement work beyond the ion-ion collisional time scale?" Phys. Plasmas, Vol…
  • p. 54 …This method uses a pulsed high-energy neutron source and the time-of-flight (TOF) diagnostics…
  • p. 57 …The longer the charge time, the higher the charge in the energy storage capacitor bank and…
  • p. 58 …The challenge in these systems is that the unloading time is short and the container is…
  • p. 59 …by the number of detectors, the detector configuration, the collimated beam size, the acquisition time, and…
  • p. 62 …The Tokamak has a shorter trip time by employing a power level that is six times…
  • p. 63 …In this fashion, an array of multiple IECs increase the overall confinement time roughly in proportion…
  • p. 64 …This recirculation significantly increases the confinement time verses that of a simple cusp devise, leading to…
  • p. 65 …This re-trapping greatly increases the confinement time of a MCSA fusion device. 58 UNCLASSIFIED/;CEiOAt…
  • p. 66 …in the IEC high power-to-weight of the MCSA enables fast trip times. The concept…
  • p. 67 …across the outer surface, so increased confinement times have been achieved by going to the massively…
  • p. 68 …Here n is the ion density and Tis the ion confinement time. Assuming the converged core…
  • p. 69 …A specially designed radio frequency (RF) ion gun is installed on the side of the chamber…
UNCLASSIFIED/ ;cl (Nomenclature defined in Reference 6.1)
algorithm, H.J. Kim developed a fully implicit particle-in-cell scheme and implemented it
using a Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov algorithm that does not require actual formation
and storage of the Jacobian matrix to minimize the computational costs. The scheme
features the following properties: 1) fully implicit method where all quantities of both
the particle and the field equations are consistent at each time step, and 2) a good
property for energy conservations.
H.J. Kim's study verified that the algorithm correctly handles the typical electrostatic
modes. For example, the results agree with the linear dispersion relations for simple
limits of two cold electron counter-streaming instabilities, electron Landau damping,
and ion acoustic waves. The simulation experience presented here demonstrates the
energy conservation property of the systems and the efficacy of nonlinear solver
combined with an efficient pre-conditioning which is derived from the nonlinear Poisson
equation and particle description relations. For ion acoustic waves, the maximum
variation in the total energy is much less than 0.1 percent, indicating that a fully
implicit technique performs well in that particular simulation. The number of linear and
nonlinear iterations is significantly reduced when the preconditioner is applied. In fact,
for the case of linear iterations, the iteration number of a preconditioned linear system
is 10 times smaller than that of a linear solver without precondition er. In addition, grid
convergence test shows that the scaling of CPU time is virtually linear according to the
grid number. The time convergence test suggests that employing the largest time step
compatible with accuracy in a given calculation is the most efficient route for obtaining
the solution because the CPU time decreases as the time step increases.
H.J. Kim performed a normal mode analysis of the ion-ion counter-streaming instability
in a spherical inertial electrostatic confinement in order to gain insights into the ion-
injected inertial electrostatic confinement equilibrium configuration. To do this, it is
assumed that the electrostatic confinement equilibrium ion beams are proportional to
1/r2, effectively neutralizing the background electron density. It is evident from the
analysis of cold ion beams that two-stream instability in finite spherical systems may be
excited for small beam velocities compared to those of homogeneous and infinite
42
UNCLASSIFIED/ /f8R 8fflliil.«1k W&lii Si'llk¥

Not linked to a story yet.

About this file

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.