2016/05/08 by Zach Meisel, Z. Meisel, Keren Shi +4
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Aerospace engineering #Astro and Planetary Science #Engineering #Jet (fluid) #Materials science #Mechanics #Nuclear Physics and Applications #Physics #Rocket and propulsion systems research #nucl-ex #physics.ins-det
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.nima.2016.04.115
published as Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 828, 8 (2016)
openalex publication_date 2016/05/08 · arxiv created 2016/05/12 · arxiv updated 2016/05/16 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In order to optimize the performance of gas-jet targets for future nuclear reaction measurements, a detailed understanding of the dependence of the gas-jet properties on experiment design parameters is required. Common methods of gas-jet characterization rely on measuring the effective thickness using nuclear elastic scattering and energy loss techniques; however, these tests are time intensive and limit the range of design modifications which can be explored to improve the properties of the jet as a nuclear reaction target. Thus, a more rapid jet-characterization method is desired. We performed the first steps towards characterizing the gas-jet density distribution of the HIPPO gas-jet target at the University of Notre Dame's Nuclear Science Laboratory by reproducing results from 20\rmNe(α,α)20\rmNe elastic scattering measurements with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations performed with the state-of-the-art CFD software ANSYS Fluent. We find a strong sensitivity to experimental design parameters of the gas-jet target, such as the jet nozzle geometry and ambient pressure of the target chamber. We argue that improved predictive power will require moving to three-dimensional simulations and additional benchmarking with experimental data.