Investigating 1D Radiation Hydrodynamics Simulations of ICF Experiments

Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) is a potential energy source that is being studied at various laser laboratories such as the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) at the University of Rochester. The LLE is one of the nation’s premier sites for the study of ICF and is home to the OMEGA laser system. The 60-beam OMEGA laser system has amassed thousands of shots worth of data since 1995 and has provided these data to laboratories such as Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1996.

In this work, we simulate a scenario of a typical direct drive ICF experiment as performed in the OMEGA laser system. Sixty ultraviolet lasers are positioned evenly around a target capsule that is less than one tenth of a centimeter in diameter. The beams focus near the surface of the target and fire for only a nanosecond, superheating the outer layers and causing them to ablate, thus super-compressing and heating the gas core, where fusion reactions are onset by the implosion.

HELIOS is a 1D Lagrangian radiation hydrodynamics code that can be used to simulate many ICF experiments such as those performed at the OMEGA laser. The HELIOS code was used to test the effects of adjusting a number of parameters of the given experimental problem both independently and concurrently. HELIOS was found to be effective in modeling idealized ICF experiments, and with further study these considerations can be used to in theory improve the design of future ICF experiments, and systems with which to model them.