A new equation of state for Rhenium

Rhenium is a very high impedance material that can be used as a driver to create multi megabar pressure waves in target materials. It is also a potential pressure calibrant in extreme pressure DAC experiments as gasket material. We use density functional theory to calculate the principal Hugoniot up to 20 Mbar. Similarly, the principal isentrope is calculated to 4 Mbar. The DFT framework uses Mermin’s generalizations to finite temperature and the equation of state values are obtained via ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations. Isentrope and cold curve calculations are also compared to ELK all electron calculations. Shock experiments performed on Sandia National Laboratories’ Z Pulsed Power Facility, among others, are compared to the DFT simulations. Finally, we use this information in Los Alamos’ code OpenSesame to create a broad range, multiphase tabular equation of state for use in hydrodynamics codes.