Parametric Optimization of Inductively Driven Liner Compression Driver System

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06

The performance of an Inductively Driven Liner Compression (IDLC) driver system for the Fusion Driven Rocket (FDR) application is optimized in this study by performing a parametric analysis of the IDLC driver configurations. The FDR is a novel concept developed by MSNW LLC, which directly converts fusion energy into propulsive energy, where the fusion energy is produced by an inductively driven metal liner compression of a Field Reversed Configuration (FRC) plasmoid. To identify the optimum system configuration for the IDLC driver system for the FDR, a 1D liner code is developed in this study to run different test configuration cases and to identify the optimum system configuration. The results from the 1D liner code is verified against a commercial SPICE circuit solver and a commercial explicit structural dynamics code to verify that the 1D liner code correctly captures the essential liner dynamics for performance tuning. The parametric analysis results from the 1D liner code showed that the IDLC driver system prefers higher voltage to capacitance for a fixed capacitor bank energy. A slightly negative initial seed flux is also seen to improve the liner compression performance. For the optimized design point identified in this study, an energy coupling between the liner kinetic energy and the bank capacitive energy of 69 % is obtained for a fixed capacitor bank energy of 1.8 MJ.