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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. 5 …Photo of Center Spot Formation ......................................................... 12 Figure 2.1. The "Historic" Early IEC Ion Injection Experiment…
  • p. 9 …The ideal, however, is the elimination of the grid altogether which can be done via formation…
  • p. 12 …This result was quite negative for electron formation of potential wells, but left the route possibly…
  • p. 14 …most critical factors which inhibit deep well formation are inadequate spherical focusing and charge neutralization. The…
  • p. 18 …The ion formation is done in the high pressure gun discharge region outside of the chamber…
  • p. 19 …Photo of Center Spot Formation. The main beam observed is a direct path along the injector…
  • p. 20 …Klevans, "Theory of Potential-Well Formation in an Electrostatic Confinement Device", J. of Appl. Phys., Vol…
  • p. 22 …As shown in the paper, he found structure for both consistent with well formation. One possible…
  • p. 30 …However, to date, formation of the jet has only been studied under steady-state operation. 23…
  • p. 31 …The result is the formation of the intense space charge neutralized ion beam (or "plasma jet…
  • p. 32 …This type of ion formation in the IEC has been studied extensively by workers at Nambe…
  • p. 35 …The approach being pursued at UIUC is the formation of deep potential wells with angular ion…
  • p. 45 …considered well formation with emphasis on angular momentum effects (Reference 4.4). Earlier studies had assumed…
  • p. 48 …is very encouraging for formation of deep wells in IEC devices designed for reactors using beam…
  • p. 49 …Krylov algorithm that does not require actual formation and storage of the Jacobian matrix to minimize…
  • p. 69 …While very demanding, plasma simulations show that carefully controlled injection can provide the potential well formation…
  • p. 70 …This eliminates the need for a grid by formation of a deep potential well (ion trap…
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
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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.