Numerical simulation of liner implosions onto working fluid plasmas

Summary form only given, as follows. The Phillips Laboratory has long been involved in the computational and experimental investigation of solid liner implosions to achieve high energy densities. To date experiments have been performed to demonstrate the ability to implode both cylindrical and quasi-spherical liners over solid electrodes as well as electrodes with injection vanes. Separate experiments have demonstrated the ability to properly form and inject a hot plasma through these vanes into the liner implosion volume. In the past, the 2 1/2 dimensional magnetohydrodynamic code Mach2 has been used to model the working fluid injection, and the code CALE has been used to model liner implosions. Mach2 has recently been modified to properly model liner implosions, allowing for the possibility of modeling both injection and implosion in the same simulation. Improvements to Mach2 have included the addition of an interface tracker and the addition of the Steinberg-Guinan constitutive model for modeling liner strength. These new capabilities allow for high fidelity modeling of liner implosions. Liner simulations with constant density and pressure inside the liner are compared to the non-uniform profiles resulting from working fluid injection. Peak pressures are predicted for several proposed liner implosion experiments.