Direct-drive heavy ion beam inertial confinement fusion: a review, toward our future energy source

Abstract

Direct-drive heavy ion beam (HIB) inertial confinement fusion (ICF), or HIF would be a promising future energy source for society. Particle accelerators produce HIBs with precise particle energies, pulse lengths and pulse shapes with high energy efficiencies of ~30-40%. Higher energy driver efficiency means that a lower fusion energy output is required to construct a HIF power station to supply ~1 GW of electricity. A HIF power station could use about 4 to 5 MJ of HIB energy per shot at a shot rate of ~10 Hz. This review is focused on the direct-drive scheme in HIF. In directdrive fuel target HIBs deposit their energy into a shell surrounded by a denser tamping outer layer. The DT (Deuterium-Tritium) fusion fuel, with a total mass of several mg, must be compressed to about one thousand times solid density to reduce the input driver energy and to achieve an adequate burn fraction. Highdensity compression is a major challenge in ICF, requiring that non-uniformity in driver energy deposition be kept lower than a few percent. The axis of an HIB can be made to oscillate sufficiently rapidly to improve the uniformity of energy deposition.

Code O-SUKI-N 3D: Upgraded Direct-Drive Fuel Target 3D Implosion Code in Heavy Ion Inertial Fusion

“…Compile the main function of the Lagrangian code and execute it. 5. If any problems do not appear during the calculation of the Lagrangian code, compile the main function of the data conversion code and execute it.…”

“…In order to compress the DT fuel stably to the high density, the implosion non-uniformity should be less than a few percent [3] The key issues of the fuel implosion in ICF include how to realize the uniform implosion. The O-SUKI-N 3D code system provides an integrated computer simulation tool to study the DT fuel implosion, ignition and burning in heavy ion inertial confinement fusion (HIF) [4,5].…”

Fuel compression in the magnetized cylindrical implosion driven by a gold tube heated by heavy ion beams

“…Heavy ion beam (HIB) has many advantages for ICF [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. HIB-ICF (HIF) is a novel approach to thermonuclear fusion energy with higher drive efficiency than most other approaches.…”

Au L-shell x-ray emission induced by 154.3–423.9 MeV/u C6+ ions

“…The BEA is in better agreement with the experiment as a whole.High energy ions have been extensively exploited in different ways in various disciplines, such as, astrophysics, atomic physics, plasma physics, materials physics, biomedicine and so on, for both fundamental research and practical application 1-6 . High energy heavy ions beam is also an alternative driver for the indirect-drive inertial confinement fusion [7][8][9][10] . Here, the energy of the driving beam is first converted into x-ray radiation by bombarding of the high energy pulsed beam with a hohlraum made of high-Z material, and then the radiation drives the fuel pellet to implode.…”