Efficiency Improvements - 2016

March

A NIF Record: 17 Shots in a Week

The NIF Team completed 17 target shots during the last week of March, including eight target shots in a little more than a day. The record shot week brings the total NIF target shot count for the first half of Fiscal Year 2016 to 210—good progress toward meeting NIF’s ambitious goal of 400 shots for the year, which ends Sept. 30.

During the week the team demonstrated a new mode of operation to reduce setup and alignment time. All 192 NIF beams were aligned at the same time, and subsets of eight-beam bundles were then fired on different targets in rapid succession (known as “Gatling gun” shots). The new operational mode is among a wide variety of efficiency improvements recommended by a 120-day study in 2014 that identified more than 80 improvements to equipment and procedures leading to reduced time and effort for fielding experiments.

Among the record shot week’s experiments were two sets of four backlighter spectral experiments, each on different materials, to investigate x-ray production efficiency. Each set of four shots was completed in about 14 hours. The team also completed a set of four foam-liner evaluation shots using the same drive beam, this time in a 24-hour period. These sequences evaluated how well thin layers of a low-density foam in the NIF hohlraum can suppress laser backscatter and improve coupling efficiency of the laser energy with the interior of the hohlraum. In addition, a beryllium capsule convergent ablator implosion experiment and four complex Discovery Science experiments were conducted.

“This record shot week produced a wealth of new data,” said NIF Operations Manager Bruno Van Wonterghem. “The shot count for March was 36 target shots and one laser shot, or 10 shots per shot week. It was great work by the entire NIF organization to pull this off.”