Modeling of multi-interface, diverging, hydrodynamic experiments for the National Ignition Facility

Abstract The National Ignition Facility (NIF) will soon provide experiments with far more than ten times the en-ergy than has been previously available on laser facilities. In the context of supernova-relevant hydrodynamics, this will enable experiments in which hydrodynamic instabilities de-velop from multiple, coupled interfaces in a diverging ex-plosion. This paper discusses the design of such blast-wave-driven explosions in which the relative masses of the layers are scaled to those within the star. It reports scaling simu-lations with CALE to model the global dynamics of such an experiment. CALE is a hybrid, Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian code. The simulations probed the instability growth and multi-interface interactions in mass-scaled systems us-ing different materials. The simulations assist in the target design process and in developing an experiment that can be diagnosed