Anybody Have an Opinion About Sandia's MagLIF?

[TheRadicalModerate]

MagLIF = Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion

A couple of news items went by on this a couple of months ago, but I just recently started digging into it, and it sounds pretty promising to me--for a simulation, at least. Not apropos of Polywell at all, but it seemed more like theory than news. I thought I'd post something over here so somebody who knows what they're talking about can throw rocks at it.

Here's the scheme, per Slutz, Vesey, et al.:

1) Capsule with a cylindrical beryllium liner, about 1 cm long, 4 mm wide, mounted in a Z-Pinch. They have a supplementary paper on fooling with the density and composition of the D-T in the capsule

2) Pre-magnetized with an axial 10T B-field. Pre-heating freezes the field into the plasma.

3) Just at the start of Z-Pinch compression of the liner, they illuminate both ends of the cylinder with a laser to ionize and freeze in the axial B-field, then continue on to pre-heat. The laser pulse is pretty modest (5-10 kJ, resulting in pre-heating to 200-500 eV.

4) The imploding liner does the usual ICF-style heating through shock stagnation.

5) The frozen-in axial field prevents radial electron and alpha particle losses, and they're claiming the losses through the z-axis aren't high enough to screw things up.

6) Pretty short pulse times (100 ns or so). Looks like the optimal pulse length is proportional to the length of the cylinder, and they get all kinds of inductive weirdness when the liner is more than about 1 cm.

7) They're claiming that the liner has fewer compression instabilities if it's a bit thicker than usual, and they admit that the compression instabilities are a risk that's poorly quantified by the sim.

There are two papers. The first one is from March, 2010.

The second one came out in January, 2012 (the actual paper is behind a pay wall):

It's all simulation so far, so I'm not ready to run out and start breeding tons of tritium just yet, but they're gonna run the experiment in the Z Machine next year. News reports have them claiming Q=1000 from their most recent sims. The first paper claims 100 kJ at 25 mega-amps per pulse, with the possibility of 50 MJ at 60 mega-amps.

Anybody have an opinion?

[hanelyp]

- Even at 25MA, a Z-pinch sounds easier than laser driven implosion.
- If they hit it hard enough to get the fusion done fast enough, pinch instabilities shouldn't be a problem.
- Q=1000 sounds like an extraordinary claim. Experiment is a very much needed sanity check.
- It's still expending machined units, though it looks like of much simpler and more easily mass produced design than a typical laser implosion device.