Moment-Based Accelerators for Kinetic Problems with Application to Inertial Confinement Fusion

In inertial confinement fusion (ICF), the kinetic ion and charge separation field effects may play a significant role in the difference between the measured neutron yield in experiments and the predicted yield from fluid codes. Two distinct of approaches exists in modeling plasma physics phenomena: fluid and kinetic approaches. While the fluid approach is computationally less expensive, robust closures are difficult to obtain for a wide separation in temperature and density. While the kinetic approach is a closed system, it resolves the full 6D phase space and classic explicit numerical schemes restrict both the spatial and time-step size to a point where the method becomes intractable. Classic implicit system require the storage and inversion of a very large linear system which also becomes intractable. This dissertation will develop a new implicit method based on an emerging moment-based accelerator which allows one to step over stiff kinetic time-scales. The new method converges the solution per time-step stably and efficiently compared to a standard Picard iteration. This new algorithm will be used to investigate mixing in Omega ICF fuel-pusher interface at early time of the implosion process, fully kinetically.

Name thesis:degree_name

Nuclear Engineering

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Nuclear Engineering

Year

2014

Author dc:creator

• Taitano, William

Contributors dc:contributor

• Prinja, Anil
• Knoll, Dana
• Oliveira, Cassiano
• Sulsky, Deborah

• moment based accelerator
• plasma physics
• inertial confinement fusion
• mix
• kinetic
• HOLO

Language dc:language

English

Identifier

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ne_etds/7

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalrepository.unm.edu:ne_etds-1006