Tungsten Shielding in Rocket Engine

A rocket engine requires one or more current carrying loops surrounding the reaction region to produce the magnetic field that deflects the plasma and charged radiation from the drive pulses. Typically, these loops are made of superconductors, since any normal conductor would quickly melt or vaporize under the high currents needed to produce the field. The field coils are backed by a high tensile strength support to withstand the magnet-current back reaction from bursting the superconductor.

These field coils must be protected from the intense neutral radiation that the drive pulses produce. This is because a superconductor that becomes too hot will cease to superconduct. A common shielding design is a sheet of tungsten with a "V"-shaped cross section at a very narrow opening angle, resembling a knife-edge. The point of the V faces the radiation source, the field coil runs along the open top of the V. At very small angles of incidence, tungsten makes a good reflector of x-rays so that most x-rays are simply reflected at low angles away from the field coils and into space. Since tungsten atoms are much heavier than neutrons, a collision between a tungsten nucleus and a neutron results in the neutron rebounding with most of its original energy, delivering only 1% of its energy on average to the tungsten shield. This scatters the neutrons away from the field coils. The narrow opening angle means that the tungsten knife edge is essentially a sheet perpendicular to the incoming radiation, allowing a large radiator area compared to the cross section exposed to the radiation.

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