Open AccessENERGY PARTITIONING, ENERGY COUPLING (EPEC) EXPERIMENTS AT THE NATIONAL IGNITION FACILITY
Author(s) -
K. B. Fournier,
Charles G. Brown,
Mark May,
W. H. Dunlop,
S. Compton,
J. Kane,
Paul B. Mirkarimi,
Robert L. Guyton,
E. Huffman
Publication year - 2012
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Reports
DOI - 10.2172/1034490
Subject(s) - overpressure , ignition system , national ignition facility , blast wave , coupling (piping) , energy (signal processing) , shock (circulatory) , shock wave , nuclear engineering , waveform , optics , laser , environmental science , physics , nuclear physics , mechanics , aerospace engineering , inertial confinement fusion , engineering , mechanical engineering , medicine , radar , quantum mechanics
The energy-partitioning, energy-coupling (EPEC) experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) will simultaneously measure the coupling of energy into both ground shock and air-blast overpressure from a laser-driven target. The source target for the experiment is positioned at a known height above the ground-surface simulant and is heated by four beams from NIF. The resulting target energy density and specific energy are equal to those of a low-yield nuclear device. The ground-shock stress waves and atmospheric overpressure waveforms that result in our test system are hydrodynamically scaled analogs of seismic and air-blast phenomena caused by a nuclear weapon. In what follows, we discuss the motivation for our investigation and briefly describe NIF. Then, we introduce the EPEC experiments, including diagnostics, in more detail