This project is now filled.

Supervisors: Tom Goffrey (Physics), Tony Arber (Physics)

Direct-drive inertial fusion energy[1] (IFE) requires high-energy lasers to be focused on a spherical target. The outer material of the target (usually plastic) ablates, driving an implosion of the core deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel.

To design efficient future experiments and interpret previous ones an accurate and predictive computational modeling capability is required. This must include a formal understanding of the sources and magnitudes of uncertainty. This project will investigate the uncertainty in direct-drive IFE calculations arising from the equations-of-state used. The primary outcome of the project will be an uncertainty quantification (UQ) framework that could also be applied to other areas of uncertainty, such as opacity, emissivity and thermal transport.

References:

1. R.S. Craxton et al., Direct-drive inertial confinement fusion: A review, Physics of Plasmas 22, 110501 (2015). DOI: http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4934714