Existing and emerging methods in computational mechanics are rarely validated against problems with an unknown outcome. For this reason, Sandia National Laboratories, in partnership with US National Science Foundation and Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division, launched a computational challenge in mid-summer, 2012. Researchers and engineers were invited to predict crack initiation and propagation in a simple but novel geometry fabricated from a common off-the-shelf commercial engineering alloy. The goal of this international Sandia Fracture Challenge was to benchmark the capabilities for the prediction of deformation and damage evolution associated with ductile tearing in structural metals, including physics models, computational methods, and numerical implementations currently available in the computational fracture community. Thirteen teams participated, reporting blind predictions for the outcome of the Challenge. The simulations and experiments were performed independently and kept confidential. The methElectronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10704-013-9904-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, USA e-mail: blboyce@sandia.gov ods for fracture prediction taken by the thirteen teams ranged from very simple engineering calculations to complicated multiscale simulations. The wide variation in modeling results showed a striking lack of consistency across research groups in addressing problems of ductile fracture. While some methods were more successful than others, it is clear that the problem of ductile fracture prediction continues to be challenging. Specific areas of deficiency have been identified through this effort. Also, the effort has underscored the need for additional blind prediction-based assessments.

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Neutron Imaging System (NIS) has been used to image the burn volume and cold fuel volume of imploding fusion capsules. In this work, we present a design of neutron imaging aperture for inertial confinement fusion in Laser Fusion Research Center. Since the total neutron yield should be less than 1014, the penumbral aperture has been chosen. A geometric model has been developed to assess the performance of the neutron imaging system, including the spatial resolution, the field of view and the signal-to-noise ratio. This model reproduces the performances of neutron image systems on OMEGA. The spatial resolution of designed NIS is about 22 μm for a field of view of 250 μm. The signal-to-noise ratio can be better than 10, if the neutron yield is higher than 1013.

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