Researchers from HB11 Energy including Scientific Advisory Board member, Prof. Dimitri Batani, recently participated in a collaborative academic experiment at the ELI Beamlines Facility in Prague, Czech Republic. ELI BL is the world’s largest and most advanced high-power laser infrastructure and a global technology and innovation leader in high-power, high-intensity, and short-pulsed laser systems.
The successful experiment delivered a great deal of data, revealing the ‘equation of state’ of boron nitride (BN) in the high-pressure range, up to 20 Megabars. The emission and reflectivity of a BN sample under the action of a traversing shock wave generated by laser (I~1014 W/cm2) were measured with two VISAR systems and the SOP system. This will allow researchers to characterise shock velocity in BN and the pressure and the density of shocked BN, which in turn will enable them to perform hydrodynamic calculations based on experimentally delivered quantities.
Boron nitride is interesting as a target material for proton boron fusion but also because of its mechanical and thermodynamic properties. It could be used as a candidate to replace synthetic diamond as an ablator for inertial confinement fusion experiments.
A few participants in the experiment benefited from financial support provided by the Cost Action 21128 PROton BOron Nuclear Fusion (PROBONO). This support impacts everything from energy production to medical applications.
