Study on optimal inertial-confinement-fusion hohlraum wall radial density and wall loss

Reducing hohlraum wall loss is one of the most important ways to improve hohlraum coupling efficiency in laser indirect drive inertial-confinement fusion. It is appeared that a high Z metallic foam as hohlraum wall material will reduce wall loss. By adjusting initial hohlraum wall density distribution along radial axes to rho(0)(r) = kr, the numerical simulation results show that it can indeed bring best savings of similar to 40% general wall loss. We conclude that absorbed energy mainly decreases by restraining rarefactions, and a proper slope k can optimize internal energy loss of low density and increased kinetic loss by subsonic. Also saved energy ratio reduces with source temperature decreasing. This approach would cut the reactor driver that needs quite substantially if experiments demonstrate it. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3562873]