This research concerns the development of a diamond anvil cell (DAC) that will enable the attainment and accurate measurement of static pressures above 1 TPa (10 Mbars). (The current peak that has been attained is 5.6 Mbars, exceeding that at the center of the earth). At such levels of static pressure, major changes in the properties of materials take place (e.g., in binding and structure, and in electronic behavior .. e.g., oxygen becomes metallic). This new, high-performance DAC (HPDAC) will allow studies of the properties and behavior of materials in pressure regimes never before achieved. The main focus of the project will be to develop and implement numerical simulation and optimization tools that can be used for the best design of the HPDAC. A combination of boundary element and finite element methods will be used to create this simulation tool. Numerical simulations of the operation of the optimized HPDAC will be compared to experimental results and to simulations based on other designs optimized heuristically.
