P2 asymmetry of Au's M-band flux and its smoothing effect due to high-Z ablator dopants

X-ray drive asymmetry is one of the main seeds of low-mode implosion asymmetry that blocks further improvement of the nuclear per-formance of“high-foot”experiments on the National Ignition Facility[Miller et al.,Nucl.Fusion 44,S228(2004)].More particularly,the P2 asymmetry of Au's M-band flux can also severely influence the implosion performance of ignition capsules[Li et al.,Phys.Plasmas 23,072705(2016)].Here we study the smoothing effect of mid-and/or high-Z dopants in ablator on Au's M-band flux asymmetries,by modeling and comparing the implosion processes of a Ge-doped ignition capsule and a Si-doped one driven by X-ray sources with P2 M-band flux asymmetry.As the results,(1)mid-or high-Z dopants absorb hard X-rays(M-band flux)and re-emit isotropically,which helps to smooth the asymmetric M-band flux arriving at the ablation front,therefore reducing the P2 asymmetries of the imploding shell and hot spot;(2)the smoothing effect of Ge-dopant is more remarkable than Si-dopant because its opacity in Au's M-band is higher than the latter's;and(3)placing the doped layer at a larger radius in ablator is more efficient.Applying this effect may not be a main measure to reduce the low-mode implosion asymmetry,but might be of significance in some critical situations such as inertial confinement fusion(ICF)experiments very near the performance cliffs of asymmetric X-ray drives.

Effects of mode coupling between low-mode radiation flux asymmetry and intermediate-mode ablator roughness on ignition capsule implosions

The low-mode shell asymmetry and high-mode hot spot mixing appear to be the main reasons for the performance degradation of the National Ignition Facility(NIF)implosion experiments.The effects of the mode coupling between low-mode P2 radiation flux asymmetry and intermediate-mode L=24 capsule roughness on the implosion performance of ignition capsule are investigated by two-dimensional radiation hydrodynamic simulations.It is shown that the amplitudes of new modes generated by the mode coupling are in good agreement with the second-order mode coupling equation during the acceleration phase.The later flow field not only shows large areal density P2 asymmetry in the main fuel,but also generates large-amplitude spikes and bubbles.In the deceleration phase,the increasing mode coupling generates more new modes,and the perturbation spectrum on the hot spot boundary is mainly from the strong mode interactions rather than the initial perturbation conditions.The combination of the low-mode and high-mode perturbations breaks up the capsule shell,resulting in a significant reduction of the hot spot temperature and implosion performance.

Numerical simulations of instabilities in the implosion process of inertial confined fusion in 2D cylindrical coordinates

In this paper, we introduce a multi-material arbitrary Lagrangian and Eulerian method for the hydrodynamic radiative multi-group diffusion model in 2D cylindrical coordinates. The basic idea in the construction of the method is the following: In the Lagrangian step, a closure model of radiation-hydrodynamics is used to give the states of equations for materials in mixed cells. In the mesh rezoning step, we couple the rezoning principle with the Lagrangian interface tracking method and an Eulerian interface capturing scheme to compute interfaces sharply according to their deformation and to keep cells in good geometric quality. In the interface reconstruction step, a dual-material Moment-of-Fluid method is introduced to obtain the unique interface in mixed cells. In the remapping step, a conservative remapping algorithm of conserved quantities is presented. A number of numerical tests are carried out and the numerical results show that the new method can simulate instabilities in complex fluid field under large deformation,and are accurate and robust.