News
Dec 2024
First user experiments with Pulsed Power at ESRF!
Late November / Early December 2024 saw Simon Bland, Kassim Mughal and Jergus Strucka from Imperial College hosting the first 'user' experiments driven with Pulsed Power for the ESRF Shock Beam Allocation Group. Teams from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), and Onera (France) all travelled to Grenoble to work with the Imperial researchers, alongside Alexander Rack and Bratislav Lukic - the beamline scientists at ID19.
Over 7 days of beamtime, the teams completed 104 collaborative experiments on a diverse range of topics including optimizing the energy transferred into jets formed by colliding shockwaves, exploring methods to inject medications via bubble collapse, and studying the behavior of circuit boards subject to extreme current densities to simulate lightning strikes. A great time was had by all - multiple journal articles are now being prepared, and the data has already been used in a PhD thesis by student from ETH (good luck Guillaume!).
An X-ray movie taken at ID 19, with frames every 176ns and X-ray energies of 30-40keV. The movie shows the explosion of a copper foil driven by a ~100kA, 500ns rising current pulse. The foil is bent into a right angle and produces colliding shockwaves in a surrounding layer of gelatin. At the boundary between the gelatin and the air, a dense, high speed jet of material is observed as the shockwaves release. These experiments enable hydrodynamic simulations to be validated and allow us to explore how energy deposition at explosion might optimize the jet parameters in complex geometries.
3rd Dec 2024
Experiments at the European XFEL
Postdoctoral researcher, Mila Fitzgerald, spent much of November at the European XFEL, assisting beamline scientists in setting up diagnostics and participating in experimental beamtime investigating the phase transitions of metals under extreme pressures. Accurate measurements of materials are the cornerstone of our simulations for inertial fusion energy.
Mila and the HED target chamber
14th Nov 2024
Experiments at LCLS to investigate instabilities relevant to inertial confinement fusion schemes
A team of researchers from Imperial College London, the University of Nevada, Reno, the University of California, Berkeley, and First Light Fusion have recently conducted first-of-a-kind experiments at the Linac Coherent Light Source facility in California. Supported by onsite scientists from the MEC and XPP beamlines, and with simulation support from Sandia National Laboratories, the team explored the growth of the Electrothermal Instability in copper foils exploded by fast rising pulses of electrical current.
The Electrothermal Instability grows from small imperfections in a metal as it heats up and undergoes phases changes before ablating into plasma. It can influence the subsequent growth of larger scale hydrodynamic processes like the Richtmyer Meshkov instability, which affects the performance of many Inertial Fusion Energy schemes. The team utilized precisely machined microscopic voids, some as small as 1 microns in diameter, to act as seeds for the Electrothermal Instability, observing the subsequent dynamics of the voids and the surrounding material through an X-ray microscope with a ~100x100 micron field of view and femtosecond temporal resolution. .
The experiments involved complex logistics including production of the targets through laser ablation and ion milling, and the development and transport of a portable 100kiloampere pulsed power generator to the USA. Over 72 hours of continual beamtime ~50 experiments were performed with incredible results which are now being analyzed in detail.
As well as featuring new, exciting measurements, the experiments demonstrated the first use of pulsed power at an X-ray Free Election Laser facility. We thank everyone who helped with the experiments and look forwards to many more in future!
First Light Fusion and Imperial College researchers after a long night on the beamline - Simon Bland, Katie Marrow, Kate Osborn, Jergus Strucka and Shaw Dickinson
Project lead Jergus Strucka loading a foil into the pulsed power driver
26th Oct 2024
1st Annual Gathering and Science Advisory Board meeting
On the 17th of October we held our first Annual Gathering, with many members of the Partnership getting together at First Light Fusion’s headquarters in Yarnton. We had a number talks - describing the Partnership for new members and our progress to date - tours of First Lights Gas Gun and Pulsed Power facilities and most importantly time to get to know each other and build new friendships and collaborations. On the 18th of October this was followed by our first Science Advisory Board meeting where we received excellent feedback and constructive advice from our board members - we look forwards to acting on this over the next year and the Partnership going from strength to strength. Thankyou to everyone who came to the meetings, and all the team involved in their planning!
3rd Oct 2024
18th International Conference of the Physics of NonIdeal Plasmas
On the 16th - 19th Sept the International Conference of the Physics of NonIdeal Plasmas was held at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (UK) and covered many different aspects of non-ideal plasmas including transport theory, ab initio simulations and ICF plasmas. Several scientists from the Amplifi Prosperity Partnership attended the conference and presented their work on these and related topics. A notable mention is the presentation of Nikita Chaturvedi (Imperial College) on MHD simulations of Z-pinch plasmas in hot and warm dense matter regimes, and the talk of James Allison (First Light Fusion) on EoS uncertainty quantification applied to First Light Fusion amplifier design. Many of the talks are now available on the Indico page (https://indico.cern.ch/event/1437801/timetable/#20240915).
28th Sept 2024
Euro-Asia Pulsed Power Conference 2024
Dr Bland presented some of the Partnerships latest research at the EAPPC-Beams-EML conference in Amsterdam last week (Home | Eappc Beams Eml 2024 (eappc-beams-eml2024.org). This included two posters - one on 3D printing high voltage insulators using FDM techniques, the other on a ‘portable’ 250kA X-pinch for radiography, diffraction and absorption spectrometry. Both posters were extremely popular and relied heavily on our summer students efforts - many thanks to Madeleine King, Guzman Sanchez and Chaoyi Jing! We will be writing up the 3D printing results over the next month for submission to a Additive Manufacturing. All the presentations can be seen on our publications page.
Poster session at the conference - over 2 hrs the poster on 3D printed was always crowded!
19th Sept 2024
Preparations for experiments at ESRF and LCLS
The last few weeks have seen a flurry of activity at the Partnership. Over August and September Jergus Strucka, our PhD students and our summer interns assembled and tested a brand new Pulsed Power generator for use in ETI instability experiments at the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford University. Meanwhile at the start of the month Jergus Strucka and Simon Bland travelled to ESRF to test a new power supply and train beamline scientists ready for the first open user experiments exploring pulsed power driven shock waves and instabilities in November as part of the shock Beam Allocation Group.
New 150kA, 500ns generator on test at Imperial College for ETI experiments at LCLS
New Spellman ethernet controlled power supply on test at ESRF
5th August 2024
Summer student visit to First Light Fusion
As part of the Prosperity Partnership each Imperial, York and Oxford all take on summer students to help with their research. These positions, each with a stipend to provide for living costs, are advertised at Universities throughout the UK. The studentships regularly scope out new, blue skies ideas that evolve into parts of our research program and commercial applications.
All of the students are invited to visit First Light Fusion to learn first hand their approach to Fusion energy production. Today they toured M3 and the gas gun facilities and learnt all about the different diagnostics and simulation tools employed by the researchers there. Thankyou to Claudia, Francisco and everyone involved in making it such a rewarding trip!
30th July 2024
New high speed camera delivered
Imperial College has just taken delivery of an incredible ultra fast framing camera from the team at Specialised Imaging. The camera can record 32 individual images each 1280 x 960 pixels in size with an arbitrary start time and gate down to only 3ns. It will be used in experiments across the Partnership studying the dynamics of amplifiers and targets driven by high pressure shockwaves and will help us explore new higher speed imaging techniques at ESRF and EuXFEL. The camera is paired with a 400W long pulse laser system to provide shadowgraphy and schlieren imaging, or can be used with a pre-existing Verdi laser for interferometry. The first experiments with the camera will take place on the MACH and MAGPIE facilities over the next few months.
Thankyou to Jo Cleaves from Specialised imaging for making the trip to Imperial to deliver the camera and training us in its use.
Below - test of camera at Imperial College examining an electrical arc from an 80kV, 40ns risetime generator. The movie shows formation of discharge with 3ns exposure per frame, 0ns in-between frames (a ‘speed’ of 333,333,333 frames per second!).
16th July 2024
First Paper attributed to the Prosperity Partnership!
Dr Alex Rack, the beamline scientist at ID19 of ESRF has just published a review of dynamic shock / compression research at ID19, including some of the work from the Amplifi Prosperity Partnership using Gas Gun and Pulsed Power drivers to explore instabilities and cavity collapse in targets.
The paper is published in High Pressure Research (by Taylor and Francis) and can be found here:
14th July 2024
Congratulations to Jergus Strucka for being awarded time at both LCLS and the ID24 beamline at ESRF
As part of his research Jergus is exploring the dynamics of the Electrothermal Instability in pulsed power driven conductors. Much of this work started in his PhD thesis, where Jergus performed the first high resolution radiography of the instability in exploring wires on the ID19 beamline at ESRF.
Between the 2 measurements we will be able to built new models of the ETI and provide significantly improved validation for computer simulations. The experiments at LCLS will be the first time pulsed power is utilized there as an experimental platform.
We’d like to say a special thankyou to Prof Tom White at UNR and to Dr Raffaella Torchio of ESRF for encouraging and collaborating on our applications!
These radiographs are from the ID19 beamline at ESRF - taken by Jergus Strucka in a collaboration between Imperial College and Technion.
The wire is driven by ~35kA in 500ns. Radiographs are >10keV, and imaged via a scintillator and Shimadzu X2 camera. Axial striations are clearly seen on the lower radiograph as the wire explodes.
11th June 2024
AMPLIFI is showcased as a key UK collaboration for Inertial Fusion Energy at EuXFEL Workshop
Sam Vinko from University of Oxford and Francisco Suzuki-Vidal from First Light Fusion showcased our Prosperity Partnership AMPLIFI at the “Tackling Some Inertial Fusion Energy Challenges at the European XFEL” workshop. Worldwide experts in the fields of high-energy density physics and inertial fusion community met over 2 days to discuss the general role of X-ray Free Electron Lasers towards an inertial fusion energy plant and identify relevant activities and potential flagship experiments that can be pursued at EuXFEL.
(https://indico.desy.de/event/44643/)
26th March 2024
AMPLIFI is introduced to the UK inertial fusion community
Simon Bland and Francisco Suzuki-Vidal gave an overview of our Prosperity Partnership at the UK Inertial Fusion Consortium Meeting at Imperial College London. The meeting, organized by Aidan Crilly of Imperial College, took place over 2 days with talks and posters from all of the labs and universities in the UK involved in ICF research. The Partnership discussed its aims for the next 5 years and possible ways to collaborate with our research.
