A. Parvazian and S. R. Hoseini Dalasm,
Volume 27, Issue 1 (7-2008)
Abstract
In recent years, many different plans have been considered to use the nuclear energy gained from inertial confinement fusion (ICF) as attempts to obtain high energy efficiencies. In conventional ICF methods, a small amount (about mg) of the deuterium–tritium compound is confined in a small spherical chamber of a few millimeters in radius and compressed by laser or heavy ion beams with powers in the order of W. The consequent plasma froming at the center of the chamber is an essential issue for fusion. The hydrodynamical instabilities during the fuel compression process arising in the conventional ICF technique leads to a decline in energy efficiency. The new plans for reducing instabilities involve compression of the fuel chamber in two stages using laser or ion beams. In the first stage, fuel is preheated by laser or ion and in the second phase, relativistic electrons are constructed by -W laser phases in the fuel. This heating method has come to be known as a fast “ignition method”. More recently, cylindrical rather than spherical fuel chambers with magnetic control in the plasma domain have been also considered. In this work, fast ignition method in cylindrical fuel chambers will be investigated and transportation of the relativistic electrons will be calculated using MCNP code and the Fokker–Planck program. Furthermore, the transfer rate of relativistic electron energy to the fuel will be calculated. Our calculations show that the fast ignition method and cylindrical chambers guarantee a higher energy efficiency than the one-step ignition and that it can be considered an appropriate substitute for the current ICF techniques.
