Publications

Abstract not provided.

Abstract not provided.

In principle, the energy released by a fission can be converted directly into electricity by using the charged fission fragments. The first theoretical treatment of direct energy conversion (DEC) appeared in the literature in 1957. Experiments were conducted over the next ten years, which identified a number of problem areas. Research declined by the late 1960's due to technical challenges that limited performance. Under the Nuclear Energy Research Initiative the authors are determining if these technical challenges can be overcome with todays technology. The authors present the basic principles of DEC reactors, review previous research, discuss problem areas in detail, and identify technological developments of the last 30 years that can overcome these obstacles. As an example, the fission electric cell must be insulated to avoid electrons crossing the cell. This insulation could be provided by a magnetic field as attempted in the early experiments. However, from work on magnetically insulated ion diodes they know how to significantly improve the field geometry. Finally, a prognosis for future development of DEC reactors will be presented .

QUICKSILVER is a 3-d electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulation code developed and used at Sandia to model relativistic charged particle transport. It models the time-response of electromagnetic fields and low-density-plasmas in a self-consistent manner: the fields push the plasma particles and the plasma current modifies the fields. Through an LDRD project a new parallel version of QUICKSILVER was created to enable large-scale plasma simulations to be run on massively-parallel distributed-memory supercomputers with thousands of processors, such as the Intel Tflops and DEC CPlant machines at Sandia. The new parallel code implements nearly all the features of the original serial QUICKSILVER and can be run on any platform which supports the message-passing interface (MPI) standard as well as on single-processor workstations. This report describes basic strategies useful for parallelizing and load-balancing particle-in-cell codes, outlines the parallel algorithms used in this implementation, and provides a summary of the modifications made to QUICKSILVER. It also highlights a series of benchmark simulations which have been run with the new code that illustrate its performance and parallel efficiency. These calculations have up to a billion grid cells and particles and were run on thousands of processors. This report also serves as a user manual for people wishing to run parallel QUICKSILVER.

Inductive energy storage systems can have high energy density, lending to smaller, less expensive systems. The crucial element of an inductive energy storage system is the opening switch. This switch must conduct current while energy is stored in an inductor, then open quickly to transfer this energy to a load. Plasma can perform this function. The Plasma Opening Switch (POS) has been studied for more than two decades. Success with the conventional plasma opening switch has been limited. A system designed to significantly improve the performance of vacuum opening switches is described in this paper. The gap cleared of plasma is a rough figure-of-merit for vacuum opening switches. Typical opened gaps of 3 mm are reported for conventional switches. The goal for the system described in this paper is more than 3 cm. To achieve this, the command-triggered POS adds an active opening mechanism, which allows complete separation of conduction and opening. This separation is advantageous because of the widely different time scales of conduction and opening. The detrimental process of magnetic field penetration into the plasma during conduction is less important in this switch. The opening mechanism duration is much shorter than the conduction time, so penetration during opening is insignificant. Opening is accomplished with a fast magnetic field that pushes plasma out of the switch region. Plasma must be removed from the switch region to allow high voltage. This paper describes some processes important during conduction and opening, and show calculations on the trigger requirements. The design of the switch is shown. This system is designed to demonstrate both improved performance and nanosecond output jitter at levels greater than one terawatt. An amplification mechanism is described which reduces the trigger energy. Particle-in-cell simulations of the system are also shown.

In two recent publications relativistic electron flow in cylindrical magnetically-insulated transmission lines (MITL) was analyzed and modeled under the assumption of negligible electron pressure. Cylindrical MITLs were used because of their common occurrence, and because they are the simplest case of finite width. The authors show in this report that the models apply equally to MITLs of any cross section.

New techniques have been recently developed that allow unstructured, free meshes to be embedded into standard 3-dimensional, rectilinear, finite-difference time-domain grids. The resulting hybrid-grid modeling capability allows the higher resolution and fidelity of modeling afforded by free meshes to be combined with the simplicity and efficiency of rectilinear techniques. Integration of these new methods into the full-featured, general-purpose QUICKSILVER electromagnetic, Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code provides new modeling capability for a wide variety of electromagnetic and plasma physics problems. To completely exploit the integration of this technology into QUICKSILVER for applications requiring the self-consistent treatment of charged particles, this project has extended existing PIC methods for operation on these hybrid unstructured/rectilinear meshes. Several technical issues had to be addressed in order to accomplish this goal, including the location of particles on the unstructured mesh, adequate conservation of charge, and the proper handling of particles in the transition region between structured and unstructured portions of the hybrid grid.

This paper will include a brief overview of the components of the QUICKSILVER suite and its current modeling capabilities. As time permits, results from sample applications will be shown, including time animations of simulation results.