Adaptive Mesh Refinement for ICF Calculations

This paper describes our use of the package PARAMESH to create an Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) version of NRL's FASTRAD3D code. PARAMESH was designed to create an MPI-based AMR code from a block structured serial code such as FASTRAD3D. FASTRAD3D is a compressible hydrodynamics code containing the physical effects relevant for the simulation of high-temperature plasmas including inertial confinement fusion (ICF) Rayleigh-Taylor unstable direct drive laser targets. These effects include inverse bremmstrahlung laser energy absorption, classical flux-limited Spitzer thermal conduction, real (table look-up) equation-of-state with either separate or identical electron and ion temperatures, multi-group variable Eddington radiation transport, and multi-group alpha particle transport and thermonuclear burn. Numerically, this physics requires an elliptic solver and a ray tracing approach on the AMR grid, which is the main subject of this paper. A sample ICF calculation will be presented. \newline \newline MacNeice et al., ``PARAMESH: A parallel adaptive mesh refinement community tool,'' Computer Physics Communications, 126 (2000), pp. 330-354.