National Ignition Facility target design and fabrication

Abstract

The current capsule target design for the first ignition experiments at the NIF Facility beginning in 2009 will be a copper-doped beryllium capsule, roughly 2 mm in diameter with 160-µm walls. The capsule will have a 75-µm layer of solid DT on the inside surface, and the capsule will driven with x-rays generated from a gold/uranium cocktail hohlraum. The design specifications are extremely rigorous, particularly with respect to interfaces, which must be very smooth to inhibit Rayleigh-Taylor instability growth. This paper outlines the current design, and focuses on the challenges and advances in capsule fabrication and characterization; hohlraum fabrication, and D-T layering and characterization.2

Aerogel foil plasma: Forward scattering, back scattering, and transmission of laser radiation

“…It is proposed to use the method of a dynamic plasma phase plate (Voronich et al, 2001) for smoothing spatial intensity distribution of heating radiation on the target. The optical transparency of a plasma layer is an essential method of a dynamic plasma phase plate, which leads to the necessity of using the low density volume-structured media (Borisenko et al, 1994(Borisenko et al, , 2008Khalenkov et al, 2006;Moreau et al, 2009;Yu et al, 2009b) Volume-structured materials are considered as different functional elements in the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) targets (Dunne et al, 1995;Gus'kov & Rosanov, 1997;Bugrov et al, 1997Bugrov et al, , 1999aBugrov et al, , 1999bNazarov et al, 1999;Cook et al, 2008;Nobile et al, 2006). First of all, smoothing of a heating inhomogeneity and production of a steady compression of the ICF targets prove to be possible applications of those materials.…”

Review on high repetition rate and mass production of the cryogenic targets for laser IFE

“…The main steps of this production line have been investigated over the period of 1995-2016. They are as follows: mass production of shells [34,[36][37][38][39][40][41] , shell coating with protective layers [42][43][44][45] , fuel filling [30,31,44,46,47] , cryogenic fuel layering [45,46,48,49] , target acceleration and injection [47,[50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57] , flying target tracking and shooting [50,[57][58][59][60][61][62][63] . It is supposed that the first power plants will work with radioactive D-T fuel, which is a major limitation to IFE.…”

Study on Au + U + Au sandwich Hohlraum wall for ignition targets

“…The progress of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) will soon lead to experiments to ignite fusion capsules (Cook et al, 2008;Nobile et al, 2006;Seifter et al, 2009). Further progress in inertial fusion and high energy density physics in general will greatly depend on the development of efficient targets.…”