Setting requirements for ignition and gain on Pacific Fusion's Demonstration System

Pacific Fusion was founded to realize the potential of pulser-driven inertial confinement fusion energy. Our immediate objectives are to achieve facility gain (more fusion output than stored in the capacitors) and to resolve significant technical hurdles to building fusion power plants. We will achieve this with the Demonstration System (DS), a pulsed-power driver designed to deliver more than 60 MA and store approximately 80 MJ of energy. In parallel with designing and building the DS pulser, we are designing the target-area engineering systems needed to implode a metal cylindrical liner surrounding a cryogenic DT-fuel shell. Here, we describe our approach to setting requirements for the driver-target system to achieve ignition and facility gain. FLASH simulations are compared to experimental data from Z to calibrate the level of expected hydro- and MHD-instabilities. The calibrated model is then applied to a MagLIF fusion target driven by the DS circuit. We exercise this model to determine the levels of target (liner and fuel) imperfections that can be tolerated for ignition and gain.