Fuel pellet injection into heavy-ion inertial fusion reactor

Abstract

In inertial confinement fusion (ICF), the scientific issues include the generation and transport of driver energy, the pellet design, the uniform target implosion physics, the realistic nuclear fusion reactor design, etc. In this paper, we present a pellet injection into a power reactor in heavy ion inertial fusion. We employ a magnetic correction method to reduce the pellet alignment error in an ICF reactor chamber, including the gravity, the reactor gas drag force and the injection errors. We found that the magnetic correction device proposed in this paper is effective to construct a robust pellet injection system with a sufficiently small pellet alignment error. A fuel pellet would be covered by Pb and is cooled down by a liquid He. The cryo-pellet coated by Pb becomes a superconductor, when its temperature is below 7.2K. The magnetic field repels the superconductor due to the Meissner effect. We employ this effect to correct the fuel pellet injection velocity. The results of simulations demonstrate that the magnetic correction system is effective and robust to reduce the pellet alignment error.