Forbes Powell & Chuck Gibson
Luxel Corporation
P.O. Box 1879, Friday Harbor, WA 98250
Luxel
luxel.com
Polyimide has been proposed as an alternate material for Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) Target capsules. When compared to the current baseline, hydrocarbon polymer, polyimide has higher strength and better radiation resistance. The fabrication of polyimide capsules has been demonstrated at several laboratories. These capsules were produced in small batches using the decomposable mandrel technique.
For an IFE power plant to be economically feasible, however, the capsules must be produced using low-cost manufacturing techniques that are fully automated. The work presented in this paper focused on alternate fabrication methods that can be scaled to mass-production levels. The automated equipment developed at Luxel inserts a bubble of polyamic acid, the precursor of polyimide, into an acoustic levitator and cures it in situ. The resulting thin-wall capsules have an aspect ratio appropriate for Direct Drive IFE. Thick wall capsules can be produced by adding additional material using ink-jet or other methods directly onto the levitating shell.
This paper will discuss the automated polyimide capsule fabrication processes developed by Luxel and will give an overview of the steps required to fabricate capsules.
The work performed was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under the Phase I SBIR grant #DOE DE-FG03-01ER83263.
