Validation of the compression regime of a new nickel Equation of State

Nickel is used for many applications, such as wire arrays on Sandia’s Z machine, and is also a constituent of alloys, such as stainless steel. A high-fidelity equation of state (EOS) is needed in order to design experiments using predictive simulations, which in turn require that the EOS is validated in the regime it is going to be used. We present experimental data taken from Sandia’s Z machine and the OMEGA EP laser facility, as well as density functional theory ab initio molecular dynamics simulations. These are used to guide the creation of a new, broad range EOS and validate it along the Hugoniot.