Turbulent hydrodynamics experiments using a new plasma piston

Details Turbulent hydrodynamics experiments using a new plasma piston Turbulent hydrodynamics experiments using a new plasma piston

May 2000

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000phpl....7.2099e&link_type=abstract

Physics of Plasmas, Volume 7, Issue 5, pp. 2099-2107 (2000).

Physics

7

Macroinstabilities, Microinstabilities, Plasma Dynamics And Flow, Plasma Turbulence, Plasma Production And Heating By Laser Beams

Scientific paper

A new method for performing compressible hydrodynamic instability experiments using high-power lasers is presented. A plasma piston is created by supersonically heating a low-density carbon based foam with x-rays from a gold hohlraum heated to ~200 eV by a ~1 ns Nova laser pulse [E. M. Campbell et al., Laser Part. Beams 9, 209 (1991)]. The piston causes an almost shockless acceleration of a thin, higher-density payload consisting of a layer of gold, initially 1/2 μm thick, supported on 10 μm of solid plastic, at ~45 μm/ns2. The payload is also heated by hohlraum x-rays to in excess of 150 eV so that the Au layer expands to ~20 μm prior to the onset of instability growth. The Atwood number between foam and Au is ~0.7. Rayleigh-Taylor instability, seeded by the random fibrous structure of the foam, causes a turbulent mixing region with a Reynolds number >105 to develop between piston and Au. The macroscopic width of the mixing region was inferred from the change in Au layer width, which was recorded via time resolved x-radiography. The mix width thus inferred is demonstrated to depend on the magnitude of the initial foam seed. For a small initial seed, the bubble front in the turbulent mixing region is estimated indirectly to grow as ~0.036+/-0.19 [∫√(Ag)dt]2 which would imply for a constant acceleration 0.036+/-0.019 Agt2. More direct measurement techniques must be developed in larger scale experiments to remove potential complicating factors and reduce the error bar to a level that would permit the measurements to discriminate between various theories and models of turbulent mixing.

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