The New Scheme to Promote Ignition by Compressing Collision–Merging Target of FRC

Abstract

Five years ago, the feasibility research program of fusion ignition for magnetized plasma initiated by our Institute and CAEP in China, which aimed to 1) building the ”MC-1-like” device to generate the ultrahigh magnetic fields; 2) building the so- call ”Ying Guang 1” facility to create the high temperature and high density target of field reversed configuration (FRC); 3) developing a simulation tool to describe the process of formation and transportation of FRCs. After five years now, the ultrahigh magnetic fields over 1400 Tesla has been achieved at CAEP of China, which is believed to be important to suppress the heat conduction from charged particles and deposit the energy of alpha particle to promote the ignition process while the ”YG 1 facility ” has been built and it is believed that the centimeter's length and diameters of the formed FRC is formed, which has the average density is 1.3×10 ^ 16 cm^-3, and the average temperature is 137 eV. The two dimensional magneto hydrodynamic code, which is so called MPF-2D tools, has been developed to simulate and investigate the process of the formatting process of FRC. As the primary progress, the simulating results of this 2-D MHD code agree well with the experiment approximately. On the other hand, we are investigating the feasibility of achieving ignition of magnetized plasma by Magneto- Hydrodynamic simulation. The ignition condition for plasma target with the embedded magnetic field has been investigated. Due to the progress mentioned above, the new scheme of ignition by compressing the magnetized plasmoids with the solid liner merged by the colliding process of two FRCs has been proposed as next five years plan. This scheme should promote the ignition process economically and quickly. At the first step, one of high temperature plasmiods with the close configuration of magnetic field line has be confirmed to be formed after head-to-head collision of two high speed FRCs and the feasibility of ignition by the compressing process of solid liner should be investigated by our two dimensional simulating results. We believe this national five-year plan can help us to get the goal of fusion ignition for magnetized plasma in the near future.