Material liner — mechanical and liquid-liner MIF
Matter as the compressor: a magnetised target plasma compressed by a solid pusher assembly or a rotating liquid-metal liner on millisecond-class time-scales, far slower than pulsed-power or laser implosions. SCPN-MIF-LINER-CORE owns the device truth of the mechanical_or_liquid_liner_mif configuration.
What the configuration is
Where MagLIF drives a thin metal shell with a current pulse in a hundred nanoseconds, the material-liner family moves a much heavier liner much more slowly: an array of pneumatic pistons or synchronised drivers collapses a solid shell or a rotating vortex of liquid metal onto a magnetised target at kilometres per second, over tens of microseconds to milliseconds. The slow drive buys a repetition-capable plant: the liner can be recovered and reused, and a liquid wall doubles as heat extraction and neutron blanket. The physics of the compression is the same two conservation laws, cylindrical flux compression and adiabatic heating, in their ideal limit.
What the core owns
- the device boundary: plant and experiment truth, shot lifecycle and configuration policy for schemes compressing a magnetised target with a material liner;
- liner-system semantics as device truth: liner-material and drive-class declarations (pneumatic and piston arrays, rotating liquid vortex), compression-symmetry budgets, liner–plasma interface declarations, and the repetition-capable plant orientation as configuration facets;
- diagnostic semantics, reference frames and clock identity declarations;
- actuator-response model boundaries and the declared safety envelope; the device-owned CONTROL adapter specification;
- the binding to the SCPN Phase Orchestrator reactor registry (version 1.0.0) and the machine-readable domain manifest.
What it explicitly excludes
- MagLIF-class pulsed-power solid-liner implosion: SCPN-MIF-MAGLIF-CORE; plasma-jet liners: SCPN-MIF-PLASMA-JET-CORE.
- Target-plasma physics for a compact-toroid target: SCPN-FRC-CORE; the pulsed FRC merge-compression workflow, trigger and RTL: SCPN-MIF-CORE.
- Solver mathematics and validation evidence: SCPN-Fusion-Core, until an exact surface passes the reactor family migration gate; no solver code exists in, or was copied into, the device core.
- Typed signal semantics and comparability: SCPN-Phase-Orchestrator (review-only output, never actuation).
- Control admission and action formation: SCPN-Control is the sole software authority that forms an admitted control action.
- Machine protection: independent systems retain the final veto.
- Portfolio presentation, identity, entitlement and execution gating: SCPN-Studio.
Level-0 physics and its anchor
The core evaluates the mechanics of the driven annular shell — its mass as the exact annulus \(\rho\pi[(r+d)^2-r^2]l\), its kinetic energy at the declared velocity, the magnetic pressure \(B_0^2/2\mu_0\) of the target's initial field and the characteristic time \(r_0/v\) — and the stagnation limits by flux compression \(B_0 C^2\) and adiabatic compression \(T_0 C^{2(\gamma-1)}\), both recorded as upper bounds.
Anchored on LA-7686-MS (Moses, Krakowski & Miller, Los Alamos, 1979), whose Table II-I prints, for two Fast Liner Reactor design points, the initial liner inner radius (0.2 m and 0.3 m), thickness (3.0 mm and 4.5 mm), azimuthal field (13.0 T) and liner energy (0.336 GJ and 0.756 GJ); the text prints a copper liner 0.2 m long and an implosion of 20 to 40 microseconds. The implosion velocity survives the extraction only as the range 10³–10⁴ m/s; at 10⁴ m/s the kinetic energy of the printed copper shell reproduces both printed energies to 0.83 %, at 10³ m/s it is a hundredfold too small, and the characteristic time \(r_0/v\) is 20 and 30 µs against the abstract's 20 to 40. The energy anchor is asserted at one per cent, not exactly, because the report rounds to three figures and never prints the copper density it used.
Load both design points in the explorer →
Non-claims
- No equation of motion, equation of state or transport equation is solved; every number is a closed-form evaluation on a declared point.
- The compressed field is the perfect-conductor limit and the compressed temperature the loss-free limit; both are upper bounds, never predictions.
- No yield, gain, reactivity, confinement or breakeven statement is made, and no value describes or validates a real machine; reproducing a printed number is an anchor on the arithmetic and nothing further.
- The repository is not machine-ready, not safety-certified and not reactor-ready; liner-material, driver-array and fuel choices are configuration facets, not separate claims.
Capabilities and evidence
Evidence maturity computational_prototype, five implemented capabilities, each with its evidence record in VALIDATION.md: the device configuration model (validated parameter objects with documented consistency estimates, canonical serialisation, a data-only SPO registry pin); the diagnostic and clock semantics model (synthetic channel and clock declarations aligned fail-closed with the pinned SPO observability catalogue); level-0 device physics (the closed forms on this page); the device 3D model and the device CAD model (one body per stage of the drive, tessellated on the shared kernel library and built again as exact solids). No parameter set or channel describes any real machine or diagnostic; the claim inventory is empty and verified by the domain validator.