Creation and Validation of Electrical Conductivity Models

Broad range conductivity models are used in a wide range of simulations often spanning large sections of phase space. Quite often, the tuning parameters in these models are set to match experimental data at ambient and along some low pressure heating path, eventually extrapolating to some ideal environment at high temperature. In such a model, the treatment of conductivity in the intermediate density and temperature warm dense matter region is unconstrained and this can cause significant inaccuracies in subsequent MHD simulations. The use of density functional theory to calculate the conductivity reduces the uncertainty of the models significantly but experimental data is still needed in order the validate these models. In this presentation we discuss the basics of building a conductivity model and using Sandia's Z and Thor machines to validate it or infer what corrections are needed.