Simulation of gas dynamic behavior in dry-wall inertial fusion energy chambers

Dry-wall chambers are currently the favored approach for laser-driven inertial fusion energy (IFE). Understanding the gas dynamic response in dry-wall chambers after a target explosion is essential in order to resolve the critical issues of chamber clearing, wall response, and propagation of targets and beams for the following shot. In order to address these critical issues, a program of experiments is anticipated in which ignition conditions will be simulated with pulsed energy sources in scaled chambers. Therefore, understanding the scaling of gas dynamic responses is critical. In this work, chamber gas dynamic responses to pulsed energy deposition were modeled numerically for different shapes, sizes and initial energy distributions in order to characterize the dependencies and to help establish the validity of size scaling for simulation experiments