Polar Direct-Drive Plastic Capsule Implosions for Studying Mix on the National Ignition Facility
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Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Hsu, Scott C.
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LANL will perform two Defect Induced Mix Experiment (DIME) implosion campaigns on NIF in July and September, 2012. This presentation describes the goals for these shots and the experimental configuration and diagnostic set up to collect the appropriate data. The first two-shot campaign will focus on executing polar direct drive (PDD) implosions of plastic CH capsules filled with deuterium gas. Gas filling will be performed through a fill tube at target chamber center. A vanadium backligher foil will provide x-rays to radiograph the last half of the implosion to compare the implosion trajectory with modeling predictions. An equatorial groove in one of the capsules will be present to determine its effect on implosion dynamics. The second DIME campaign will commission and use a spectral imager (MMI) to examine the evolution of thin capsule layers doped with either Ge or Ga at 1.85%. Spectral line emission from these layers will quantify the mix width at the inner shell radius and near an equatorial groove feature.
A multi-chord fiber-coupled interferometer [Merritt et al., Rev. Sci. Instrum. 83, 033506 (2012)] is being used to make time-resolved density measurements of supersonic argon plasma jets on the Plasma Liner Experiment [Hsu et al., Bull. Amer. Phys. Soc. 56, 307 (2011)]. The long coherence length of the laser (> 10 m) allows signal and reference path lengths to be mismatched by many meters without signal degradation, making for a greatly simplified optical layout. Measured interferometry phase shifts are consistent with a partially ionized plasma in which an initially positive phase shift becomes negative when the ionization fraction drops below a certain threshold. In this case, both free electrons and bound electrons in ions and neutral atoms contribute to the index of refraction. This paper illustrates how the interferometry data, aided by numerical modeling, are used to derive total jet density, jet propagation velocity ({approx} 15-50 km/s), jet length ({approx} 20-100 cm), and 3D expansion.