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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 271 records · Page 15
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2023

Achieving Higher Fidelity Pulsed-Power Simulations Using Advanced Gap Closure Modeling

This project has progressed several physics models in the EMPIRE plasma simulation code to achieve higher fidelity simulations of high-current diode operation in pulsed-power accelerators. In this report, we present details for the following major work products: (1) a set of verification problems covering all key processes involved in gap closure physics has been designed; this suite has facilitated feature vetting and overall model maturation, (2) a new EMPIRE exemplar has been developed: the Radiographic Integrated Test Stand 6 (RITS-6) diode, and (3) An exemplar for the Saturn accelerator exemplar was enabled by the models matured under this work to self-consistently simulate further into the diode pulse than previously possible (bipolar flow regime). These developments have lead to the highest confidence EMPIRE power flow predictions of the Saturn accelerator to date. Additionally, three modeling approaches for simulating electrode plasmas have been investigated. We report on these results and provide recommendations.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2012

A novel local equilibrium model for shaped tokamak plasmas

A model is proposed for a local up-down symmetric equilibrium in the vicinity of a specified magnetic surface with given elongation and triangularity. Different from the Miller's model [R. L. Miller et al., Phys. Plasmas 5, 973 (1998)], the derivative of the Shafranov shift in the present model is self-consistently determined. The equilibrium accounts for all the essential features, like the elongation, the triangularity, and the Shafranov shift etc., of a shaped cross section. Hence, it can be used for investigation of radially localized plasma modes, like reversed shear Alfvenic eigenmodes and ballooning mode, etc., and it is also suitable for local equilibrium construction used for flux tube plasma simulations.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2017

Measurement of Temperature and Density Profiles of the Plasma at PR-2 Facility

A new system of probe diagnostics at linear plasma simulator PR-2 is described, allowing us to measure the profiles of plasma temperature and density in different cross sections of the plasma column. The Langmuir probe fixed to the movable part of the two-coordinate positioning system built into the PR-2 passes the region of the discharge area during the process of measuring plasma parameters. The overall dimensions of the positioning system make it possible to mount electrical probes (magnetic probes, optical fibers, and other diagnostic equipment) covering almost the entire volume of the vacuum chamber between the magnetic mirrors of the device. We present the measurement results of local plasma parameters of the beam-plasma discharge (BPD) for different values of the input power and working gas pressure. The boundaries of appearance of discharge of three types were determined: the diffusive BPD mode, the BPD mode, and the arc mode. Dependences of the plasma concentration and temperature on the input power for different values of pressure have been also determined.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2014

Modeling a thermionic energy converter using finite-difference time-domain particle-in-cell simulations

A thermionic energy converter (TEC) is a static device that converts heat directly into electricity by boiling electrons off a hot emitter surface across a small inter-electrode gap to a cooler collector surface. The main challenge in TECs is overcoming the space charge limit, which limits the current transmitted across a gap of a given voltage and width. We have verified the feasibility of studying and developing a TEC using a bounded finite-difference time-domain particle-in-cell plasma simulation code, OOPD1, developed by Plasma Theory and Simulation Group, formerly at UC Berkeley and now at Michigan State University. In this preliminary work, a TEC has been modeled kinetically using OOPD1, and the accuracy has been verified by comparing with an analytically solvable case, giving good agreement. With further improvement of the code, one will be able to quickly and cheaply analyze space charge effects, and seek designs that mitigate the space charge effect, allowing TECs to become more efficient and cost-effective.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Interpretive modelling of boron transport in the boundary plasma of WEST experiments with the impurity powder dropper

Abstract Boron (B) powder injection is a potential alternative to glow discharge boronization as a wall conditioning method for tokamaks. This technique is currently being studied in WEST experiments, during which B powder is injected by an Impurity Powder Dropper developed by PPPL. In order to interpret and analyse experimental trends, and to help develop future experiments, a modelling workflow using a boundary plasma simulation (SOLEDGE-EIRENE) and powder ablation simulation (Dust Injection Simulator) was developed and tested. The effect of adding a B neutral source to simulated deuterium + oxygen (D + O) plasmas was compared to experimental data from the WEST C5 campaign, where B powder was injected in a dedicated experiment. While the impact of B injection on radiated power P rad measurements at the upper divertor was similar, there were significant differences in measurements of P rad , outer strike point electron temperature T e OSP and O-II line intensity at the lower divertor between experiment and simulation. This discrepancy suggests that those parameters were affected by phenomena not present in the simulations, with the most likely candidates being reduced D recycling and a reduced O sourcing from the divertor.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2012

A 3D Monte Carlo code for the modeling of plasma dynamics and beam formation mechanism in electron cyclotron resonance ion sources

The code here presented is the first part of a Monte Carlo (MC) self-consistent 3D plasma simulator. It is yet able to solve the equation of motion for thousands of independent charged particles. The procedure allows to understand the consequences of each phenomenon introduced in the evolution steps of the code. MC random selection of starting parameters is used for each particles; the environmental conditions enclosed in the simulation are ECRIS magnetic field, resonant electromagnetic wave, initial plasma density distribution and MC calculation of Spitzer collision. The results of the first simulations explain some typical effects as the hollow beam formation and the main plasma deconfinement mechanism.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Computational hydrodynamics and optical performance of inductively-coupled plasma adaptive lenses

This study addresses the optical performance of a plasma adaptive lens for aero-optical applications by using both axisymmetric and three-dimensional numerical simulations. Plasma adaptive lenses are based on the effects of free electrons on the phase velocity of incident light, which, in theory, can be used as a phase-conjugation mechanism. A closed cylindrical chamber filled with Argon plasma is used as a model lens into which a beam of light is launched. The plasma is sustained by applying a radio-frequency electric current through a coil that envelops the chamber. Four different operating conditions, ranging from low to high powers and induction frequencies, are employed in the simulations. The numerical simulations reveal complex hydrodynamic phenomena related to buoyant and electromagnetic laminar transport, which generate, respectively, large recirculating cells and wall-normal compression stresses in the form of local stagnation-point flows. In the axisymmetric simulations, the plasma motion is coupled with near-wall axial striations in the electron-density field, some of which propagate in the form of low-frequency traveling disturbances adjacent to vortical quadrupoles that are reminiscent of Taylor-Görtler flow structures in centrifugally unstable flows. Although the refractive-index fields obtained from axisymmetric simulations lead to smooth beam wavefronts, they are found to be unstable to azimuthal disturbances in three of the four three-dimensional cases considered. The azimuthal striations are optically detrimental, since they produce high-order angular aberrations that account for most of the beam wavefront error. A fourth case is computed at high input power and high induction frequency, which displays the best optical properties among all the three-dimensional simulations considered. In particular, the increase in induction frequency prevents local thermalization and leads to an axisymmetric distribution of electrons even after introduction of spatial disturbances. The results highlight the importance of accounting for spatial effects in the numerical computations when optical analyses of plasma lenses are pursued in this range of operating conditions.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Impact of spatiotemporal smoothing on the two-plasmon–decay instability

Higher levels of hot electrons from the two-plasmon–decay instability are observed when smoothing by spectral dispersion (SSD) is turned off in directly driven inertial confinement fusion experiments at the Omega Laser Facility. This finding is explained using a hot-spot model based on speckle statistics and simulation results from the laser–plasma simulation environment. The model accurately reproduces the relative increase in hot-electron activity at two different drive intensities, although it slightly overestimates the absolute number of hot electrons in all cases. Extrapolating from the current ≈ 360-GHz system while adhering to the logic of the hot-spot model suggests that larger SSD bandwidth should significantly mitigate hot-electron generation, and legacy 1-THz OMEGA experiments appear to support this conclusion. These results demonstrate that it is essential to account for laser speckles and spatiotemporal smoothing to obtain quantitative agreement with experiments. A compilation of hot-electron data from the past two decades reveals several other important points: (1) many prior experiments are more easily understood using recent results from multibeam absolute instability theory; and (2) experiments with ignition-scale conditions produce less hot electrons compared to OMEGA spherical experiments for a given vacuum overlapped intensity, which is a promising result for validating performance predictions based on hydrodynamic scaling relations.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Ionization dynamics of intense laser-produced argon plasmas revealed by NLTE modeling

The ionization dynamics and transient behavior of under-dense plasma irradiated by an intense laser are investigated. We report two significant effects in the ionization behavior: (1) a surprisingly large delay in ionization response and (2) a stepwise ionization process which involves collisional and laser-driven photoionization (LDP) processes. Ionization induced by intense lasers can exhibit delayed responses due to rapid changes in conditions, particularly when atomic transition processes occur more slowly than the relevant time scales. Furthermore, modeling reveals that the two-step ionization process—collisional excitation followed by LDP—plays an important role in this ionization delay, with collisional excitation acting as the bottleneck. Even low-energy photons (∼3.5 eV) can predominantly ionize plasmas, challenging the conventional belief that such energies are insufficient to overcome the binding energy of bound electrons. These findings underscore the necessity of including such processes into plasma simulations for various laser-plasma experiments.

Collisional excitation↗
DOE OSTI2013

SUPPRESSION OF DIELECTRONIC RECOMBINATION DUE TO FINITE DENSITY EFFECTS

We have developed a general model for determining density-dependent effective dielectronic recombination (DR) rate coefficients in order to explore finite-density effects on the ionization balance of plasmas. Our model consists of multiplying by a suppression factor those highly-accurate total zero-density DR rate coefficients which have been produced from state-of-the-art theoretical calculations and which have been benchmarked by experiment. The suppression factor is based upon earlier detailed collision-radiative calculations which were made for a wide range of ions at various densities and temperatures, but used a simplified treatment of DR. A general suppression formula is then developed as a function of isoelectronic sequence, charge, density, and temperature. These density-dependent effective DR rate coefficients are then used in the plasma simulation code Cloudy to compute ionization balance curves for both collisionally ionized and photoionized plasmas at very low (n{sub e} = 1 cm{sup -3}) and finite (n{sub e} = 10{sup 10} cm{sup -3}) densities. We find that the denser case is significantly more ionized due to suppression of DR, warranting further studies of density effects on DR by detailed collisional-radiative calculations which utilize state-of-the-art partial DR rate coefficients. This is expected to impact the predictions of the ionization balance in denser cosmic gases such as those found in nova and supernova shells, accretion disks, and the broad emission line regions in active galactic nuclei.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Simulating nonlinear optical processes on a superconducting quantum device

Simulating plasma physics on quantum computers is difficult because most problems of interest are nonlinear, but quantum computers are not naturally suitable for nonlinear operations. In weakly nonlinear regimes, plasma problems can be modelled as wave–wave interactions. In this paper, we develop a quantization approach to convert nonlinear wave–wave interaction problems to Hamiltonian simulation problems. We demonstrate our approach using two qubits on a superconducting device. Unlike a photonic device, a superconducting device does not naturally have the desired interactions in its native Hamiltonian. Nevertheless, Hamiltonian simulations can still be performed by decomposing required unitary operations into native gates. To improve experimental results, we employ a range of error-mitigation techniques. Apart from readout error mitigation, we use randomized compilation to transform undiagnosed coherent errors into well-behaved stochastic Pauli channels. Moreover, to compensate for stochastic noise, we rescale exponentially decaying probability amplitudes using rates measured from cycle benchmarking. We carefully consider how different choices of product-formula algorithms affect the overall error and show how a trade-off can be made to best utilize limited quantum resources. This study provides an example of how plasma problems may be solved on near-term quantum computing platforms.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2014

Kinetic simulations and reduced modeling of longitudinal sideband instabilities in non-linear electron plasma waves

Kinetic Vlasov simulations of one-dimensional finite amplitude Electron Plasma Waves are performed in a multi-wavelength long system. A systematic study of the most unstable linear sideband mode, in particular its growth rate γ and quasi- wavenumber δk, is carried out by scanning the amplitude and wavenumber of the initial wave. Simulation results are successfully compared against numerical and analytical solutions to the reduced model by Kruer et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 23, 838 (1969)] for the Trapped Particle Instability (TPI). A model recently suggested by Dodin et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 215006 (2013)], which in addition to the TPI accounts for the so-called Negative Mass Instability because of a more detailed representation of the trapped particle dynamics, is also studied and compared with simulations.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

KINETIC SIMULATIONS OF THE LOWEST-ORDER UNSTABLE MODE OF RELATIVISTIC MAGNETOSTATIC EQUILIBRIA

We present the results of particle-in-cell numerical pair plasma simulations of relativistic two-dimensional magnetostatic equilibria known as the “Arnold–Beltrami–Childress” fields. In particular, we focus on the lowest-order unstable configuration consisting of two minima and two maxima of the magnetic vector potential. Breaking of the initial symmetry leads to exponential growth of the electric energy and to the formation of two current layers, which is consistent with the picture of “X-point collapse” first described by Syrovatskii. Magnetic reconnection within the layers heats a fraction of particles to very high energies. After the saturation of the linear instability, the current layers are disrupted and the system evolves chaotically, diffusing the particle energies in a stochastic second-order Fermi process, leading to the formation of power-law energy distributions. The power-law slopes harden with the increasing mean magnetization, but they are significantly softer than those produced in simulations initiated from Harris-type layers. The maximum particle energy is proportional to the mean magnetization, which is attributed partly to the increase of the effective electric field and partly to the increase of the acceleration timescale. We describe in detail the evolving structure of the dynamical current layers and report on the conservation of magnetic helicity. These results can be applied to highly magnetized astrophysical environments, where ideal plasma instabilities trigger rapid magnetic dissipation with efficient particle acceleration and flares of high-energy radiation.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Hermes-3

Hermes-3 is a plasma simulation model built on BOUT++, developed as part of research studies of the edge and divertor regions of magnetically confined fusion plasmas such as tokamaks. The main purpose of this model is multi-species simulation of plasmas containing a mixture of deuterium, tritium, helium and other plasma and neutral gas species.

Dudson, BenjaminD↗
DOE OSTI2014

Automated divertor target design by adjoint shape sensitivity analysis and a one-shot method

As magnetic confinement fusion progresses towards the development of first reactor-scale devices, computational tokamak divertor design is a topic of high priority. Presently, edge plasma codes are used in a forward approach, where magnetic field and divertor geometry are manually adjusted to meet design requirements. Due to the complex edge plasma flows and large number of design variables, this method is computationally very demanding. On the other hand, efficient optimization-based design strategies have been developed in computational aerodynamics and fluid mechanics. Such an optimization approach to divertor target shape design is elaborated in the present paper. A general formulation of the design problems is given, and conditions characterizing the optimal designs are formulated. Using a continuous adjoint framework, design sensitivities can be computed at a cost of only two edge plasma simulations, independent of the number of design variables. Furthermore, by using a one-shot method the entire optimization problem can be solved at an equivalent cost of only a few forward simulations. The methodology is applied to target shape design for uniform power load, in simplified edge plasma geometry.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2013

Spectral evolution of two-dimensional kinetic plasma turbulence in the wavenumber-frequency domain

We present a method for studying the evolution of plasma turbulence by tracking dispersion relations in the energy spectrum in the wavenumber-frequency domain. We apply hybrid plasma simulations in a simplified two-dimensional geometry to demonstrate our method and its applicability to plasma turbulence in the ion kinetic regime. We identify four dispersion relations: ion-Bernstein waves, oblique whistler waves, oblique Alfvén/ion-cyclotron waves, and a zero-frequency mode. The energy partition and frequency broadening are evaluated for these modes. The method allows us to determine the evolution of decaying plasma turbulence in our restricted geometry and shows that it cascades along the dispersion relations during the early phase with an increasing broadening around the dispersion relations.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2014

Beam-driven acceleration in ultra-dense plasma media

Accelerating parameters of beam-driven wakefield acceleration in an extremely dense plasma column has been analyzed with the dynamic framed particle-in-cell plasma simulator, and compared with analytic calculations. In the model, a witness beam undergoes a TeV/m scale alternating potential gradient excited by a micro-bunched drive beam in a 10{sup 25 }m{sup −3} and 1.6 × 10{sup 28 }m{sup −3} plasma column. The acceleration gradient, energy gain, and transformer ratio have been extensively studied in quasi-linear, linear-, and blowout-regimes. The simulation analysis indicated that in the beam-driven acceleration system a hollow plasma channel offers ∼20% higher acceleration gradient by enlarging the channel radius (r) from 0.2 λ{sub p} to 0.6 λ{sub p} in a blowout regime. This paper suggests a feasibility of TeV/m scale acceleration with a hollow crystalline structure (e.g., nanotubes) of high electron plasma density.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2022

hPIC2: A hardware-accelerated, hybrid particle-in-cell code for dynamic plasma-material interactions

The exascale era of high performance computing promises to bring the field of computational plasma physics ever closer to the goal of accurate multiscale modeling. Such computers will rely on hardware acceleration to offload work to dedicated components, notably general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs). However, devices from different manufacturers require software to be written with different parallel programming models, greatly increasing the code maintenance burden of applications designed to perform on more than one such device. hPIC2 is a hybrid plasma simulation code developed with the Kokkos performance portability framework to target the architectures that will drive exascale computing for the foreseeable future. As a hybrid simulation code, hPIC2 investigates the simultaneous use of various plasma models on the same domain, at the same time. hPIC2 also optionally couples to RustBCA, which accurately models ion-material interactions using the binary collision approximation (BCA) method. In conclusion, hPIC2 therefore achieves scalable performance on a variety of computing architectures when simulating complex and diverse plasmas, particularly near plasma-material interfaces.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗