Dalir Kosimov

During my undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, I fell in love with fluid dynamics and turbulence – something about this behaviour felt deeply mysterious to me. This, paired with a desire to find a solution to the problem of human-induced climate change, led me to pursue an MSc in Fusion Energy at the University of York, where I studied the physics of plasmas and various approaches to creating sustainable terrestrial fusion reactors. The completion of my MSc naturally led me to join the CDT at York.

My project is centred around inertial confinement fusion, which uses lasers or projectiles to compress small capsules of fusion fuel until they reach the temperatures and pressures that allow for fusion reactions to occur – like a miniature supernova. In an ideal world, the capsule would compress in a perfectly spherical manner, but due to small imperfections in the capsule material and in the drive (like non-uniform laser beams, as an example), the implosion is imperfect and leads to poor fusion yield. Another key issue is hydrodynamic instability, which is a fluid phenomenon that occurs when fluids of varying densities or velocities mix. Imperfections in the material and drive of an ICF experiment can lead to unwanted mixing, which can further spoil the uniformity of compression and result in undesirable transport of material during the implosion.

And so my research question is as follows: “What can we do with the material structure and the drive of an ICF experiment to make the compression as spherical as possible and to mitigate hydrodynamic instabilities?”. My pursuit of finding an answer to this question is funded partially by the government (EPSRC) and partially by a private company in Oxford called “First Light Fusion”, which uses projectiles as a means of compressing capsules.

Supervisors

• Prof Nigel Woolsey
• Dr Andy Higginbotham