On Stability of Targets for Plasma Jet Induced Magnetoinertial Fusion

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability of plasma targets in plasma jet-induced magneto-inertial fusion using large-scale 3D simulations, revealing instability mechanisms and optimizing target compression strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-stage simulation approach with explicit interface tracking to analyze target stability and optimize plasma liner configurations in PJMIF.

Findings

Target instability caused by liner non-uniformity and shock interactions.

Simulation of target disintegration during compression.

Optimization of jet number improves target stability.

Abstract

The compression and stability of plasma targets for the plasma jet-induced magneto-inertial fusion (PJMIF) have been investigated via large scale simulations using the FronTier code capable of explicit tracking of material interfaces. In the PJMIF concept, a plasma liner, formed by the merger of a large number of radial, highly supersonic plasma jets, implodes on a magnetized plasma target and compresses it to conditions of the fusion ignition. A multi-stage computational approach for simulations of the liner-target interaction and the compression of plasma targets has been developed to minimize computing time. Simulations revealed important features of the target compression process, including instability and disintegration of targets. The non-uniformity of the leading edge of the liner, caused by plasma jets as well as oblique shock waves between them, leads to instabilities during the target compression. By using front tracking, the evolution of targets has been studied in 3-dimensional simulations. Optimization studies of target compression with different number of jets have also been performed.