Three-dimensional simulations of high-current beams in induction accelerators with WARP3d

For many issues relevant to acceleration and propagation of heavy-ion beams for inertial confinement fusion, understanding the behavior of the beam requires the self-consistent inclusion of the self-fields of the beams in multiple dimensions. For these reasons, the three-dimensional simulation code WARP3d A.Friedman was developed. The code combines the particle-in-cell plasma simulation technique with a realistic description of the elements which make up an accelerator. In this paper, the general structure of the code is reviewed and details of two ongoing applications are presented along with a discussion of simulation techniques used. The most important results of this work are presented

SIMULATING AN ACCELERATION SCHEDULE FOR NDCX-II

The Virtual National Laboratory for Heavy-Ion Fusion Science is developing a physics design for NDCX-II, an experiment to study warm dense matter heated by ions. Present plans call for using 34 induction cells to accelerate 45 nC of Li+ ions to more than 3 MeV, followed by neutralized drift-compression. To heat targets to the desired temperatures, the beam must be compressed to a millimeter-scale radius and a duration of about 1 ns. A novel NDCX-II acceleration schedule has been developed using an interactive one-dimensional particle-in-cell simulation ASP to model the longitudinal physics and axisymmetric WARP simulations to validate the 1-D model and add transverse focusing. Three-dimensional Warp runs have been used recently to study the sensitivity to misalignments in the focusing solenoids

Developing acceleration schedules for NDCX-II

The Virtual National Laboratory for Heavy-Ion Fusion Science is developing a physics design for NDCX-II, an experiment to study warm dense matter heated by ions near the Bragg-peak energy. Present plans call for using about thirty induction cells to accelerate 30 nC of Li+ ions to more than 3 MeV, followed by neutralized drift-compression. To heat targets to useful temperatures, the beam must be compressed to a millimeter-scale radius and a duration of about 1 ns. An interactive 1-D particle-in-cell simulation with an electrostatic field solver, acceleration-gap fringe fields, and a library of realizable analytic waveforms has been used for developing NDCX-II acceleration schedules. Axisymmetric simulations with WARP have validated this 1-D model and have been used both to design transverse focusing and to compensate for injection non-uniformities and radial variation of the fields. Highlights of this work are presented here

Towards a new image processing system at Wendelstein 7-X: From spatial calibration to characterization of thermal events

Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) is the most advanced fusion experiment in the stellarator line and is aimed at proving that the stellarator concept is suitable for a fusion reactor. One of the most important issues for fusion reactors is the monitoring of plasma facing components when exposed to very high heat loads, through the use of visible and infrared (IR) cameras. In this paper, a new image processing system for the analysis of the strike lines on the inboard limiters from the first W7-X experimental campaign is presented. This system builds a model of the IR cameras through the use of spatial calibration techniques, helping to characterize the strike lines by using the information given by real spatial coordinates of each pixel. The characterization of the strike lines is made in terms of position, size, and shape, after projecting the camera image in a 2D grid which tries to preserve the curvilinear surface distances between points. The description of the strike-line shape is made by means of the Fourier Descriptors

Forward modeling of collective Thomson scattering for Wendelstein 7-X plasmas: Electrostatic approximation

In this paper, we present a method for numerical computation of collective Thomson scattering (CTS). We developed a forward model, eCTS, in the electrostatic approximation and benchmarked it against a full electromagnetic model. Differences between the electrostatic and the electromagnetic models are discussed. The sensitivity of the results to the ion temperature and the plasma composition is demonstrated. We integrated the model into the Bayesian data analysis framework Minerva and used it for the analysis of noisy synthetic data sets produced by a full electromagnetic model. It is shown that eCTS can be used for the inference of the bulk ion temperature. The model has been used to infer the bulk ion temperature from the first CTS measurements on Wendelstein 7-X