Effective Opacity for Gold-Doped Foam Plasmas

Radiation flow through gold-doped hydrocarbon foam is investigated and a model is presented to calculate effective opacity for an inhomogeneous, pressure-equilibrated gold/foam mixture based on the Levermore—Pomraning method for binary stochastic media. The effective opacity dependance on the size of the gold particles and the foam temperature are studied. The results suggest that when the mixture temperature is lower than 250 eV, the opacity difference between the 5 μm particle mix case and the atomic mix case is large enough to induce a significant discrepancy in radiation transport, which is confirmed by the hydrodynamic simulation.