Scalable Additive Manufacturing of Spherical Foam Targets for Inertial Fusion Energy

Nuclear fusion promises clean, reliable, safe, and abundant energy with minimal radiation risks. The 2022 fusion ignition demonstration at the National Ignition Facility marked a critical milestone toward achieving the goal of producing net energy via inertial fusion. However, major scientific and technological barriers remain in making inertial fusion energy (IFE) an economically viable source of electricity. One of the biggest hurdles is the cost and production rate of the spherical fuel containers, which are known as targets. For fusion to be economically competitive, targets must be produced at a fraction of the current cost and at much higher speeds. At present, target manufacturing is slow and expensive due to the need for extreme precision. This project aims to transform IFE target manufacturing from a low-volume, expensive effort into a cost-effective, mass-production enterprise. This will be achieved by generating processing science for a scalable additive manufacturing (AM) approach for producing foam targets using the two-photon polymerization (2PP) technique. This technique uses light to process material with nanoscale precision. Although 2PP can achieve the extreme precision needed for IFE targets, it currently suffers from uncontrolled defects and low production rates. These challenges will be overcome by studying and eliminating defects, increasing production rates, and reducing costs through novel light projection techniques. By transforming 2PP into a fast layer-by-layer process and developing models to predict the processing outcomes, this project seeks to create a scalable, affordable, and ultra-precise IFE target manufacturing approach. The resulting manufacturing capability will enable novel experimental and computational physics studies of target yield performance with advanced foam-based target designs. Furthermore, the manufacturing science knowledge generated in this work will pave the way for commercially viable fusion energy by enabling the industrial-scale production of IFE targets.