Development of Tritium Tracer Doped Liquid Fuel Target for Inertial Confinement Fusion at the Gekko XII-LFEX Facility

Abstract

In inertial confinement fusion (ICF), a fuel target containing deuterium and tritium is used. In recent ICF experiments on the Gekko XII LFEX facility at the Institute of Laser Engineering at Osaka University (ILE-Osaka), a target comprised of a polystyrene capsule filled with D₂O liquid and a solution of X-ray tracer materials, such as copper, titanium, or chlorine, was developed. In this study, an additional T₂O doping technique by which tritium can be mixed uniformly has been developed. The T₂O is synthesized by T₂ gas using a CuO oxidation catalyst. The T₂O is agglutinated by cold trap and transferred to a target cell in which a D₂O-solution-filled target is placed. Because polystyrene is slightly permeable for T₂O and D₂O, D₂O is exchanged by T₂O and completely mixed. Thus, a uniform tritium-doped ICF target with various materials can be fabricated. The T₂O synthesizing and doping system is developed and tested using H₂ as a cold run. The H₂O is successfully doped to a D₂O prefilled target at approximately 50% doping. This scheme will be utilized in future fast ignition experiments at ILE-Osaka.

Keywords:

• Inertial confinement fusion
• tritium-contained target
• fast ignition

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by NIFS-Toyama University in collaborations NIFS17KUHR043 and NIFS-ILE, Osaka NIFS16KUGK105 and NIFS12KUGK057, and A-STEP (AS2721002c). The authors gratefully thank Yumi Kaneyasu, Hitomi Hosokawa, and Mizuho Nagata in the Target Fabrication Group of the ILE-Osaka.