Abstract
The efforts to engineer devices to produces conditions suitable for nuclear fusion on earth have made significant leaps and bounds in recent years due to improved technology and engineering methods. Magnetized target fusion, or magneto-inertial fusion, involves the inertial compression of a pre-magnetized plasma, using high magnetic fields to insulate the plasma, thereby allowing slower and lower convergence compression than achievable by inertial techniques alone. One particular form of MTF (suggested by general fusion) involves using an intense pressure wave transmitted through a dense medium, growing in intensity due to focusing, and finally reaching a plasma and compressing it. Our model consists of a spherically symmetric domain with moving boundaries that we solve numerically through a coordinate transformation and a flux-limited finite volume method. Our work ventures towards a proof of concept, both of a mathematical technique to solve nonlinear conservation laws with moving boundaries and of the notion that current designs being considered show potential for successful fusion conditions. Our work also includes a sensitivity analysis to estimate the optimal conditions for such a reactor.
Michael Lindstrom, Sandra Barsky & Brian Wetton. Published in the Journal of Fusion Energy 34, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10894-014-9760-z
