First Light Fusion is investigating projectile-driven inertial confinement fusion. The projectiles are driven to velocities of 10-20 km/s by electromagnetic launch on our pulsed power machine, M3. Hyper-velocity projectiles drive strong shocks across material interfaces in our targets. Therefore, the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability (RMI) may be an important factor in determining target performance. Modelling is performed using two in-house codes: Hytrac (2D AMR w/ front-tracking) and B (3D multimaterial resistive-MHD).
RMI benchmarking is important for:
1) validation of hydrodynamic models
2) assessing RMI impact on target designs
Our aim is to develop an RMI modelling capability valid over a range of target setups and suitable for reproducible continuous integration testing.