Historical research guide · 1040 · 2003

Thin Liquid Wall Behavior Under IFE Cyclic Operation

A. R. Raffray · S. I. Abdel-Khalik · D. Haynes · F. Najmabadi · J. P. Sharpe

In one minute

An inertial fusion power plant does not fire once. It fires several times a second, forever, and every shot sprays the inside of the chamber with x-rays, ions and debris. Raffray, Abdel-Khalik, Haynes, Najmabadi and Sharpe, working across San Diego, Georgia Tech, Wisconsin and Idaho, examine one answer to that: line the chamber with a thin film of liquid, so the armour is not a surface that slowly erodes but a coating that is laid down fresh before each shot. Their paper is about what that film has to do between shots rather than during them. Two things decide whether the scheme works. The liquid layer has to re-form completely across the wall in the fraction of a second before the next target arrives. And the chamber itself has to be clear enough — cool enough, empty enough of vapour and droplets — for the driver beams to get through and for the next target to survive its flight in. Those, they argue, are the key issues.

Connection

Chapter 12 is about the energy substrate, and this is the unglamorous half of it: a fusion chamber is only a power source if it can be made ready again, on a timer, indefinitely. Chapter 9 gets the physics in between — the vapour, aerosol and driven plasma that a shot leaves hanging in the chamber is what the next shot has to shoot through, so the state of that plasma environment is a design parameter and not an afterthought.

From the source

An inertial fusion energy wetted-wall configuration gives the chamber a renewable armour — a thin liquid layer laid down again between shots rather than a solid surface that is consumed — and that renewability is what lets it accommodate the threat spectra a target produces.Abstract, first sentence
The behaviour that matters is behaviour under cyclic operation: the chamber has to be returned to a fit state shot after shot at the plant’s repetition rate, so the paper’s subject is the interval between shots rather than the instant of the shot itself.Title; Abstract, second sentence
The first key issue is the re-establishment of the thin liquid armour — whether the film re-forms across the whole protected surface in the time available before the next target arrives.Abstract, second sentence
The second key issue is the state of the chamber environment prior to each shot, judged against the requirements the driver imposes on beam propagation and the requirements target thermal control and injection impose on the flight of the next target through that environment.Abstract, second sentence
The work is part of the ARIES-IFE integrated study of inertial fusion chambers and their interfaces with the driver and target systems, carried out across five institutions and published as five pages of Fusion Science and Technology volume 44.Article front matter, Fusion Science and Technology 44, pages 106 to 110

The way in

https://doi.org/10.13182/fst03-a318

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

SOURCE NOT REACHED IN FULL. Published as Fusion Science and Technology 44 (1), pages 106 to 110 (July 2003), the journal of the American Nuclear Society, distributed by Taylor and Francis; the article is closed at the publisher and no copy was reached, so no text of it is reproduced here and none was read. The paper belongs to the ARIES-IFE study; the ARIES web archive at the University of California, San Diego did not answer during this work, and the Internet Archive was offline, so the usual green-copy routes were unavailable. The abstract below is the one the publisher deposited with Crossref, which is word-for-word the abstract held for this article by the Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information as record 20849497. Every claim locator below points to that abstract or to the article’s own title and front matter, never into the body of the paper. Background for the summary was read from two freely readable OSTI records by the same team on the same programme — ‘Thermo Fluid Dynamics and Chamber Aerosol Behavior for Thin Liquid Wall Under IFE Cyclic Operation’ (record 20849761, Fusion Science and Technology 46, pages 438 to 450) and Najmabadi, Raffray and Bromberg, ‘Operational Windows for Dry-Wall and Wetted-Wall IFE Chambers’ (record 20849759) — which are named as background only, and none of their findings is stated here as a claim of this paper. Author affiliations as deposited: University of California San Diego; Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Wisconsin; University of California San Diego; Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. The registry record for this work carried a sixth, empty author entry, which has been dropped.

How to cite it

A. R. Raffray, S. I. Abdel-Khalik, D. Haynes, F. Najmabadi, J. P. Sharpe (2003) Thin Liquid Wall Behavior Under IFE Cyclic Operation doi:10.13182/fst03-a318

Where it sits in the curriculum

Fusion machines: pinches, focus devices and inertial drivers