Modeling Radiative Shock Propagation through Heterogenous Media in High-Energy-Density Regime

The MARBLE campaign at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is a series of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments employing plastic foams with engineered macro-pores designed to investigate heterogeneous material mixing during laser driven shock implosions. Accurately modeling the dynamics of these foams is challenging for radiation-hydrodynamics codes due to the complex geometry that stresses multi-material modeling of equation of state (EOS) opacity, thermal conduction, and thermonuclear burn. We employed xRAGE, a LANL Eulerian radiation-hydrodynamics code, to perform the simulations and study the material effects and shock propagation in comparison with the results of companion MARBLE Void Collapse experiments performed on the OMEGA laser at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). Experimental shock propagation data helped guide three numerical simulation approaches using xRAGE: (1) a 2D homogenous foam approximation (2) a 2D toroidal-pore approximation (3) a full 3D calculation simulating spherical macro-pores. These simulation results agree with each other within 5% uncertainty demonstrating that the mixed EOS models are sufficient to model the shock speeds and the 2D approximations do not degrade accuracy in estimating shock propagation through heterogeneous macro-pore foams.