| The goal of this thesis work isto investigate a type of inertial confinement fusionconceptthat primarily uses hypervelocity projectiles to heat and compress the fusion fuel. The basic concept was originally developed in the 1960’s, but required impact velocities up to 1000 km/s(about 0.3% of the speed of light). Conventional inertial confinement requires extremely high densities to achieve ignition, which causes Rayleigh Taylor and related instabilities. The new concept includes two key ideas, with a number of other possible improvements, that should alleviate these issues. First, the fuel is preheated just beforeimpact so that the necessary impact velocity is reduced to 10’s of km/s. Second, the fuel begins at a lower density such that when itiscompressed, the fuel density is comparable to the surrounding density, thus preventing the growth of Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities. Methods for improving the performance further were also investigated, includingamplifying the energy release by having a shell that releases additional energy, having multiple smaller fueled cavities to help pre-heat the main fuel cavity, as well astheta-pinch and flux compression. Methods for preheating the fuel,economics, spin-off applications,and a possible experimentwere also studied.The likely best configuration would have a coil-gun firing a lead projectile at 15-20 km/s, with a lithium-6 metal targetwith an initial fuel density around 50 kg/m3. Preheating could be accomplished with a combination of methods including Joule heating,external neutrons beams, or other pulsed plasma heating methods. It appears that this approach is feasible with existingtechnology, and would require minimal research and expense to reach ignition.Key Words: Inertial confinement, fusion, impact fusion, magnetized targetfusion, ICF, MTF |