Speaker
Stavros Moustaizis
Description
See the full Abstract at http://ocs.ciemat.es/EPS2018ABS/pdf/P5.2011.pdf
Numerical investigations on fusion ignition process in plasma formed by
the interaction of energetic and high current ion beams
Stavros D. Moustaizis1, P. Lalousis2, I. Pologiorgi1 and S. Vlastos1
1
Technical University of Crete, Lab of Matter Structure and Laser Physics, Chania, Crete, Greece
2
Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser FORTH, Heraklion, Greece
Abstract
Numerical investigations on the interaction of two energetic and high current density ion
beams trapped in a volume with external applied magnetic field enable to study nuclear fusion
process for different ion species. The final plasma is formed by the interaction of the two
beams and is composed by the two different ion species of the beams and by low density
electrons. The configuration of the beams could be constituted in a first case by one proton
beam and one 11B beam and in a second case by two deuterium beams. The proposed scheme
for the high power ion beams production is based on both the Magnetically Insulated Diode
(MID) and Pulsed Power (PP) techniques. These techniques allow generating high energy ion
beams up to hundreds of keV with current density up to few tens of A/cm2, with relatively
low electron density. The application of this scheme for fusion overcomes the difficulty
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concerning the Hydrogen - B fuel for which the cross section for reactions is efficient for
energies higher than 250 keV. The low electron density in the formed plasma minimizes the
bremsstrahlung radiation losses, especially for the case of the Hydrogen-11B fusion plasma.
The temporal evolution of the plasma parameters and especially the reaction rate was
investigated using a multi-fluid, zero dimension, and global energy code. The code allow to
estimate the alpha heating effect on the temporal evolution of the formed plasma temperature
and the maximum value of the reaction rate, especially for the Hydrogen-11B fusion case,
where each reaction produce three alphas with total energy of 8.7 MeV. The numerical study
allows estimating the time interval to obtain the maximum of the reaction rate as a function of
the initial conditions concerning the energy and the current density of the ion beams. The
present work based on existing technologies (MID and PP) and will contribute on the design
and potential development of Compact Magnetic Fusion Devices (CMFD) with output energy
of the order of 100 MW.
