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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. 7 …Emphasis is placed on work in these areas at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, although…
  • p. 8 …of how inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion works. Gas ~ccd I in~ Spherical Vacuum . Chamber !!1…
  • p. 10 …While Hirsh worked with Farnsworth to demonstrate early experimental success with IEC experiments (Reference 1.2…
  • p. 11 …Such work was soon taken up in several other laboratories, including Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL…
  • p. 12 …electron) injected traps (as does the present author's work). This selection was largely driven by…
  • p. 15 …This work and others on the small gridded systems at that time showed several important problems…
  • p. 17 …Recent work has shown that by properly programming the distribution function of the injected electrons it…
  • p. 18 …Results indicate that although the formalism works well during the early phases of compression, when the…
  • p. 21 …Hirsch Working With Philo Farnsworth I' I'· 0 ,,, 10•u w "',. ~ 40~ CRONS D- -,C •~7…
  • p. 22 …This worked well, but the design was eventually discarded to move to RF guns with much…
  • p. 23 …This work substituted a metallic hybrid getter for the external pumping on the IEC chamber. With…
  • p. 24 …Another important example of the use of a compact IEC neutron source is the work at…
  • p. 25 …2.7) The IEC developed for this work used a magnetron ion generation technique to improve…
  • p. 26 …Still the design worked reasonably well for the initial mine detection experiments. Unfortunately, the project was…
  • p. 27 …as shown by the hybrid magnetron source work in Japan. Another point noted is the advantage…
  • p. 29 …As already noted, the basic physics of this version was originally studied in pioneering work by…
  • p. 30 …Relation to Other Prior Thrusters NASA and other laboratories have worked toward developing advanced Hall Thrusters…
  • p. 31 …Indeed, the thruster concept arose from work on a fusion based IEC (Reference 3.5). To…
  • p. 32 …Khachan's work. It too looks very promising. 25 UNCLASSIFIED/ ,u;oAt OFFIGIPk IP&'i OIIU{
  • p. 35 …at the UIUC and several other laboratories working on IECs. The issue then is how to…
  • p. 39 …In follow-on work, they simplified the modeling of charge exchange with an analytical approach to…
  • p. 40 …Satsangi, "Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Experiments at Low Working Pressure," Prepared under U.S. Army contract DAAK…
  • p. 42 …In Chacon's work, a bounce-averaged Fokker-Planck (BAFP) model was employed to obtain steady…
  • p. 45 …Before discussing this work, some definitions for the potential well structure will be reviewed. POTENTIAL WELL…
  • p. 48 …However, much more work needs to be done along these lines to fully identify the optimal…
  • p. 52 …As pointed out by Khachan his work noted D2+ becomes more significant in lower voltages). In…
  • p. 53 …Nevins, Can inertial electrostatic confinement work beyond the ion-ion collisional time scale?" Phys. Plasmas, Vol…
  • p. 70 …Chacon's work, thermalized ions build up and additional quasi- Maxwellian distriution in the trap). Still…
  • p. 71 …To accomplish this result quickly on a modest budget, we need to simplify the work by…
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
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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.