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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 901 records · Page 50

Magnetic-Confinement Fusion—Plasma Theory: Tokamak Magnetohydrodynamic Equilibrium and Stability

Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) provides a useful model to describe the crucial plasma macroscopic equilibrium and stability behaviors in toroidal tokamak devices by considering the plasma as a conducting fluid interacting with a surrounding confining electromagnetic field. MHD is the most basic plasma model, incorporating most large-scale phenomena, including plasma equilibrium and all major instabilities. MHD equations are obtained by taking moments of the Boltzmann equations for different plasma species. They provide a set of comprehensive physics constrains to compute and optimize the equilibrium plasma shape and pressure and current profiles that are critical to its stability and performance. In the ideal case, the equations have special properties that lead to efficient numerical calculation schemes, the most important of which is the ideal MHD energy principle for linear stability against small departures from equilibrium. In a tokamak plasma, equilibrium pressure is mostly destabilizing for MHD modes, whereas equilibrium current is also often a major driving force. Plasma resistivity creates new freedom for a MHD instability to grow, but there are also cases where the plasma resistivity plays a stabilizing role. Equilibrium toroidal flow and/or flow shear can affect MHD instabilities. Principal MHD instabilities include the internal kink mode, sawtooth, fishbone, external kink, resistive wall mode, resistive interchange, tearing and neoclassical tearing modes (NTMs), locked modes, toroidal Alfven eigenmodes (TAEs), and edge localized modes (ELMs). Fast-growing MHD instabilities can lead to an abrupt plasma disruption and termination that can potentially damage the device plasma facing components (PFCs) and in-vessel structures. Furthermore, an important MHD application is to develop robust techniques to mitigate and control MHD instabilities.

Dispersive pellet injection↗

Current-conserving relativistic linear response for collisional plasmas

Here we investigate the response of a relativistic plasma to electromagnetic fields in the framework of the Boltzmann equation incorporating a collision term in the relaxation rate approximation selected in a form assuring current conservation. We obtain an explicit solution for the linearized perturbation of the Fermi–Dirac equilibrium distribution in terms of the average relaxation rate k. We study the resulting covariant, gauge invariant, and current conserving form of the polarization tensor in the ultrarelativistic and non-relativistic limits. We evaluate the susceptibility in the ultrarelativistic limit and explore their dependence on k. Finally, we study the dispersion relations for the longitudinal and transverse poles of the propagator. We show that for k >2ω p , where ω p is the plasma frequency, the plasma wave modes are overdamped. In the opposite case, k$\ll$ ω p , the propagating plasma modes are weakly damped.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

A review of wireless power transfer for electric vehicles: Prospects to enhance sustainable mobility

Wireless power transfer (WPT), which transmits power by an electromagnetic field across an intervening space, provides the prospect of new opportunities for electric vehicles (EVs) to enhance sustainable mobility. In this review article we evaluate WPT technology for EV applications from both technical and sustainability perspectives. The objectives of this review include: (1) to present the state-of-the-art technical progress and research bottlenecks in WPT development and applications in the transportation sector; (2) to characterize the demonstrations of the real-world deployment of WPT EV systems; and (3) to evaluate the sustainable performance and identify challenges and opportunities for improvement. From the technical perspective, progress on coil design, compensation topologies, and power electronics converters and control methods are reviewed with a focus on system performance. From the sustainability perspective, performance is defined in terms of energy, environmental, and economic metrics, and policy drivers and issues of health and safety are also examined.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

Multiscale modeling of microwave-heated multiphase systems

Modeling of microwave heating of multiphase systems requires resolving the electromagnetic field from the single particle to the entire cavity. We introduce a multiscale methodology for computationally affordable simulations of microwave heating of multiphase systems consisting of one phase dispersed in a continuum phase. The methodology homogenizes the original multiphase system, by taking advantage of the large separation of length scales, to calculate the effective permittivity, effective thermal conductivity, and volumetric power absorbed in each phase. The methodology is rigorously assessed against particle-resolved detailed numerical simulations of model systems. We demonstrate a significant reduction in computational cost while retaining the accuracy of detailed simulations. Lastly, the present methodology enables high throughput exploration of novel multiphase system designs utilizing microwave heating.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

On a fully-implicit VMS-stabilized FE formulation for low Mach number compressible resistive MHD with application to MCF

This study presents the development and evaluation of a fully-implicit variational multiscale (VMS) stabilized unstructured finite element (FE) formulation for compressible magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) model, at low Mach number regime. The model describes the dynamics of a compressible conducting fluid in the low Mach number limit in the presence of electromagnetic fields and can be used to study aspects of astrophysical phenomena, important science and technology applications, and basic plasma physics phenomena. The specific applications that motivate this study are macroscopic simulations of the longer time-scale stability and disruptions of magnetic confinement fusion (MCF) devices, specifically the ITER tokamak. The discussion considers the development of the VMS FE representation, the structure of the stabilizing terms that deal with significant convective flows, the stabilization of the nearly incompressible response of the fluid flow, and the stabilization of the constraint that enforces the solenoidal involution on the magnetic field. The nonlinear discretized system is solved with scalable preconditioned Newton–Krylov iterative methods, which employs a multiphysics block preconditioning method based on approximate block factorizations and Schur complements. The study presents an evaluation of the VMS method on a 2D cartesian tearing mode instability, and illustrates the scalability of the solvers on MCF relevant problems. A set of results are also presented for longer time-scale stability and disruptions for the ITER tokamak. These include a vertical displacement event (VDE), and a (1,1) internal kink mode. Here, the formulation is demonstrated to be scalable and also reasonably robust with respect to the Lundquist number scaling.

42 ENGINEERING↗

SPACE: 3D parallel solvers for Vlasov-Maxwell and Vlasov-Poisson equations for relativistic plasmas with atomic transformations

A parallel, relativistic, three-dimensional particle-in-cell code SPACE has been developed for the simulation of electromagnetic fields, relativistic particle beams, and plasmas. In addition to the standard second-order Particle-in-Cell (PIC) algorithm, SPACE includes efficient novel algorithms to resolve atomic physics processes such as multi-level ionization of plasma atoms, recombination, and electron attachment to dopants in dense neutral gases. SPACE also contains a highly adaptive particle-based method, called Adaptive Particle-in-Cloud (AP-Cloud), for solving the Vlasov-Poisson problems. It eliminates the traditional Cartesian mesh of PIC and replaces it with an adaptive octree data structure. The code's algorithms, structure, capabilities, parallelization strategy, and performance have been discussed. Additionally, typical examples of SPACE applications to accelerator science and engineering problems are described.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

Nyström type exponential integrators for strongly magnetized charged particle dynamics

Solving for charged particle motion in electromagnetic fields (i.e. the particle pushing problem) is a computationally intensive component of particle-in-cell (PIC) methods for plasma physics simulations. This task is especially challenging when the plasma is strongly magnetized due numerical stiffness arising from the wide range of time scales between highly oscillatory gyromotion and long term macroscopic behavior. A promising approach to solve these problems is by a class of methods known as exponential integrators that can solve linear problems exactly and are A-stable. This work extends the standard exponential integration framework to derive Nyström-type exponential integrators that integrates the Newtonian equations of motion as a second-order differential equation directly. In particular, we derive second-order and third-order Nyström-type exponential integrators for strongly magnetized particle pushing problems. Numerical experiments show that the Nyström-type exponential integrators exhibit significant improvement in computation speed over the standard exponential integrators.

general physics↗

Free-free matrix-elements for two-photon opacity

Recent opacity measurements have inspired a close study of the two-photon contributions to the opacity of hot plasmas. The absorption and emission of radiation is controlled by dipole matrix-elements of electrons in an atom or ion. This paper describes two independent methods to calculate matrix-elements needed for the two-photon opacity and tests the results by the f-sum rule. The usual f-sum rule is extended to a matrix f-sum that offers a rigorous test for bound-bound, bound-free and free-free transitions. An additional higher-order sum-rule for the two-photon transition amplitudes is described. In this work, we obtain a simple parametric representation of a key plasma density effect on the matrix-elements. The perturbation theory calculation of two-photon cross-sections is compared to an independent method based on the solution of the time-dependent Schroedinger equation for an atom or ion in a high-frequency electromagnetic field. This is described as a high frequency Stark effect or AC Stark effect. Two-photon cross sections calculated with the AC Stark code agree with perturbation theory to within about 5%. In addition to this cross check, the AC Stark code is well suited to evaluating important questions such as the variation of two-photon opacity for different elements.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Platform development for dE/dx measurements on short-pulse laser facilities

We illustrate generating benchmark data on charged-particle stopping power in dense plasma is a challenge, motivating new experimental platforms for facilities such as short-pulse lasers. We report on several experiments that aimed to develop a platform for high-precision stopping power measurements at OMEGA EP, specifically developing target-normal sheath acceleration (TNSA) sources, proton isochoric heating, and radiatively heated foams. Integrated experiments were performed to measure stopping power, but several phenomena have been identified that would need to be mitigated for a stopping-power measurement, including irreproducibility of the TNSA sources, spurious electromagnetic fields around proton-heated targets, and cross-talk between the source and subject targets. This work provides a basis for potential future work towards mitigating these problems and performing stopping-power measurements, and is also valuable data for general understanding of TNSA and proton isochoric heating experiments.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Plasmonic hybrid core-shell (HyCoS) AgPt NP template hybridized with GQDs for SERS enhancement of 4-MBA and BT

Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is an attractive vibrational spectroscopic technique that can enable a non-destructive and ultra-sensitive detection down to the single-molecule level. Herein, a novel hybrid SERS platform is developed based on hybrid core-shell (HyCoS) AgPt nanoparticles (NPs) and graphene quantum dots (GQDs) for the enhancement of Raman vibration of 4-mercaptobenzoic acid (4-MBA) and benzenethiol (BT). The unique design of HyCoS AgPt NPs induces strong electromagnetic mechanism (EM) enhancement through the amplification of electromagnetic fields by the excitation of high-density surface plasmons and hot spots. Superior localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) is generated by the AgPt core-shell and background Ag NP coupling, which is systematically investigated by the optical properties and FDTD simulations. The background Ag NPs can further increase the coverage of metallic NPs, leading to higher-density hot spots and enhanced SERS response. At the same time, GQDs can provide plentiful accessible edges for the charge transfer to the HOMO and LUMO of 4-MBA and BT based on the chemical mechanism (CM) enhancement. The mixing approach of GQDs and target molecules on the HyCoS AgPt NPs can significantly amplify the Raman signals via the strong adsorption of probe molecules by the π – π interaction. The enhancement factors of proposed SERS platform can reach ~107 and ~105 for the 4-MBA and BT respectively.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Fast nonlinear iterative solver for an implicit, energy-conserving, asymptotic-preserving charged-particle orbit integrator

Here recently, an asymptotic-preserving (AP) particle orbit integrator has been proposed with remarkable properties including exact energy conservation, the ability to capture of all first-order drifts (including the ∇B-drift), the ability to capture trapped-passing boundaries with parallel velocity extremely close to the critical velocity, and the ability to transition from strongly to weakly magnetized spatial regions. The new AP orbit integrator is implicit, employing a Crank-Nicolson (CN) temporal discretization to ensure exact energy conservation. This, in turn, requires a local nonlinear iteration involving particle velocities and positions, and the local electromagnetic fields, to obtain the new-time solution. Ref. [1] did not attempt to provide an efficient solver for this system, and employed a brute-force GMRES-driven Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov (JFNK) solver to invert the particle orbit equations at every timestep for expediency. While JFNK is robust and reliable, it is also expensive and very intrusive for practical implementations of the method (it requires having the JFNK machinery available and solving a 6 x 6 Jacobian system iteratively once per iteration per particle).

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

An explicit, energy-conserving particle-in-cell scheme

We present an explicit temporal discretization of particle-in-cell schemes for the non-relativistic Vlasov equation that results in exact energy conservation when combined with an appropriate spatial discretization. The scheme is inspired by a simple, second-order explicit scheme that conserves energy exactly in the Eulerian context. We show that direct translation to particle-in-cell does not result in strict conservation, but derive a simple correction based on an analytically solvable optimization problem that recovers conservation. While this optimization problem is not guaranteed to have a real solution for every particle, we provide a correction that makes imaginary values extremely rare and still admits $\mathcal{O}$(10 –12 ) fractional errors in energy for practical simulation parameters. We present the scheme in both electrostatic – where we use the Ampère formulation – and electromagnetic contexts. With an electromagnetic field solve, the field update is most naturally linearly implicit, but the more computationally intensive particle update remains fully explicit. Here, we also show how the scheme can be extended to use the fully explicit leapfrog and pseudospectral analytic time-domain (PSATD) field solvers. The scheme is tested on standard kinetic plasma problems, confirming its conservation properties.

Energy conservation↗

Accelerating high-order continuum kinetic plasma simulations using multiple GPUs

Kinetic plasma simulations solve the Vlasov-Poisson or Vlasov-Maxwell equations to evolve scalar-variable distribution functions in position-velocity phase space and vector-variable electromagnetic fields in configuration space. The immense computational cost of evolving high-dimensional variables, and their large number of degrees of freedom, often limits the utility of continuum kinetic simulations and presents a challenge when it comes to accurately simulating real-world physical phenomena. To address this challenge, we present techniques that accelerate and minimize the computational work required for a scalable Vlasov-Poisson solver. We show theoretical hardware compute and communication bounds for solving a fourth-order finite-volume Vlasov-Poisson system. These bounds are then used to inform and evaluate the design of performance portable algorithms for a multiple graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerated version of the Vlasov-Poisson solver VCK-CPU [1]. We demonstrate that the multi-GPU Vlasov solver implementation, VCK-GPU, simultaneously minimizes required inter-process data transfer while also being bounded by the machine network performance limits. This results in an overall strong scaling speedup per timestep of up to 40x in three-dimensional phase space (one position, two velocity coordinates) and 54x in four dimensional phase space (two position, two velocity coordinates) and a 341x increase in simulation throughput of the GPU accelerated code over the existing CPU code. The GPU code is also able to weak scale up to 256 compute nodes and 1024 GPUs. In conclusion, we demonstrate that the improved compute performance enables exploring configurations which were previously computationally infeasible, including resolving fine-scale distribution function filamentation and multi-species dynamics with realistic electron-proton mass ratios.

Continuum kinetics↗

Surface-plasmon enhanced photoemission of a silver nano-patterned photocathode

Here, nano-patterned photocathodes (NPC) take advantage of plasmonic effects to resonantly increase absorption of light and localize electromagnetic field intensity on metal surfaces leading to surface-plasmon enhanced photoemission. In this paper, we report the status of NPC research at UCLA including in particular the optimization of the dimensions of a nanohole array on a silver wafer to enhance plasmonic response at 800 nm light, the development of a spectrally-resolved reflectivity measurement setup for quick nanopattern validation, and of a novel cathode plug to enable high power tests of NPCs on single crystal substrates in a high gradient radiofrequency gun.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

A fast numerical integrator for relativistic charged particle tracking

In this paper, we report on a fast second-order numerical integrator to solve the Lorentz force equations of a relativistic charged particle in electromagnetic fields. This numerical integrator shows less numerical error than the popular Boris algorithm in tracking the relativistic particle subject to electric and magnetic space-charge fields and requires less number of operations than another recently proposed relativistic integrator.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Impedance computations and beam-based measurements: A problem of discrepancy

High intensity of particle beams is crucial for high-performance operation of modern electron-positron storage rings, both colliders and light sources. The beam intensity is limited by the interaction of the beam with self-induced electromagnetic fields (wake fields) proportional to the vacuum chamber impedance. For a new accelerator project, the total broadband impedance is computed by element-wise wake-field simulations using computer codes. For a machine in operation, the impedance can be measured experimentally using beam-based techniques. In this article, a comparative analysis of impedance computations and beam-based measurements is presented for 15 electron-positron storage rings. The measured data and the predictions based on the computed impedance budgets show a significant discrepancy. For this article, three possible reasons for the discrepancy are discussed: interference of the wake fields excited by a beam in adjacent components of the vacuum chamber, effect of computation mesh size, and effect of insufficient bandwidth of the computed impedance.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

Generalized 3D beam dynamics model for industrial traveling wave linacs design and simulations

Beam dynamics simulations in traveling wave (TW) accelerating structures with significant beam loading is a challenging problem. Some codes are capable of calculating the TW electromagnetic fields, and some can track particles through such fields, but most cannot treat both self-consistently. A few commercial codes can model the physics correctly at the expense of many processor-hour computations to obtain converged self-consistent solutions. However, simple, accurate equations of motion for intensive beam dynamics in TW accelerating structure analysis have been previously obtained by Masunov and subsequently implemented in the Hellweg code, which was developed at the Moscow Engineering-Physics Institute. Hellweg is based on equations that allow fast simulations of beam dynamics while taking into account such effects as beam loading, space charge, and external magnetic fields. In this paper, we describe in detail some recent improvements to the Hellweg physics kernel. We have generalized the Masunov results into a 3D set of equations of motion, which include all spatial components of the radiofrequency (RF) and external magnetic fields. We have also improved the Lapostolle space charge model to the general 3D ellipsoid form for any dimensions’ ratio, consideration for the particles outside the beam core, and the fields from the neighboring bunches that can exist in the real machine. These modifications allow approaching the Hellweg accuracy to the self-consistent commercial codes while keeping the simulation time short, which is essential during the linac design and optimization stage. The implementation of these new capabilities in Hellweg is carefully benchmarked against other codes and analytical calculations. The code is freely available with an open source license.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Intrinsic resolution limits of monolithic organic scintillators for use in rep-rated proton imaging

Rep-rated diagnostics are a necessity for present and future laser facilities focused on the study of high-energy-density (HED) phenomena. Electromagnetic fields in HED systems are of particular interest to the community, but are inherently difficult to diagnose due to the high mass-densities involved. By utilizing high-energy protons that penetrate through dense plasmas, fields may be visualized by detecting variations in proton fluence caused by the Lorenz interaction of the protons with the field. Typical detecting media used for proton imaging are single-use and do not scale well to rep-rated operation. We propose the use of a scintillator-based detector and characterize the energy and spatial responses to demonstrate its feasibility as a viable option for rep-rated proton imaging and other diagnostics.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗