AWE’s Design Physics specialists are responsible for underwriting the nuclear physics safety and performance of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, and for maintaining the capability to design a successor warhead should it be required by the UK Government in the future.
We continuously work to improve our scientific understanding of the detailed physics of operation, supported by the development of accurate, multi-dimensional numerical simulations, in turn supported by sophisticated material models.
The range of physics issues that we need to understand is probably broader than in any other scientific field and we are, of course, unique in the UK. The following gives a flavour of the range of studies currently active in AWE’s Design Physics department:
- High explosive initiation & detonation
- High strain-rate phenomena - including material response and failure modes
- Nuclear physics, fission, data, radiochemistry and neutron transport methods
- Radiation transport
- Plasma physics and fusion
- Stochastic processes
- Atomic physics, LTE and non-LTE opacities and equations of state from near absolute zero to about 109 K
- Laser radiation and interaction physics
- Charged particle transport
- Turbulence modelling
- Compressible fluid dynamics
- Efficient parallel algorithms
- Electromagnetic phenomena
The Design Physics department is organised into four key areas which cover the responsibility for the main elements of warhead design:
- Primary Physics
- Secondary Physics
- Computational Physics
- Material Modelling.
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