Abstract
Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) offers many modeling challenges. One could summarize this general fact as follows: to take into account the physics occurring in a hohlraum cavity one has to elaborate specific models and try to couple them all to finally provide a quantitative solution useful for understanding past experiments and reliable for defining new ones. An example is the behavior of convergent and self‐colliding plasmas. When the cavity is filled with light gas or void, the converging velocity is large enough for the matter to interpenetrate in the vicinity of the axis. The gas dynamics hypothesis is no longer valid in that zone and one has to couple a 10 moment‐like model to smooth and delay radiation emissivity and entropy production. In this paper, we will present the three temperature hydrodynamics model commonly used in ICF and the way one adds an additional anisotropic pressure in order to mimic non‐equilibrium fluid flows. The numerical discretization takes place in the Lagrangian formalism associated with staggered scheme in space and time, and is strongly constrained by pre‐existing numerical modeling in the FCI2 code (Dautray and Watteau, Les techniques expérimentales et numériques, vol. 2. Eyrolles, 1993; and Schurtz et al. Phys. Plasmas 2000; 7:4238–4249). Grid smoothing allows us to obtain reliable solution even when large deformations occur. Those algorithms are described and some preliminary results presented to qualitatively estimate the modeling. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.