1. Improved Confinement of C-2 Field-Reversed Configuration Plasmas
- Author
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S. Primavera, K. Zhai, Ales Necas, Erik Trask, Deepak Gupta, R. Mendoza, E. Garate, Y. Song, Artem Smirnov, A. Sibley, Norman Rostoker, L. Sevier, J. S. Kinley, Hiroshi Gota, Bihe Deng, A. Van Drie, P. Feng, S. Putvinski, Sergey Korepanov, T. Valentine, Sangeeta Gupta, Jon Douglass, C. Hooper, Lothar Schmitz, J. K. Walters, M. Cordero, K. Knapp, M. C. Thompson, D. Q. Bui, K. D. Conroy, S. Aefsky, H. Y. Guo, Tae Team, M. Onofri, J. Romero, Nikolaus Rath, Y. Mok, W. Waggoner, Thomas Roche, Sean Dettrick, E. Granstedt, T. Tajima, J. H. Schroeder, Xiaokang Yang, A. Longman, M. Tuszewski, I. Allfrey, Michl Binderbauer, R. Clary, P. Yushmanov, R. M. Magee, N. Bolte, L. C. Steinhauer, D. Osin, Dan Barnes, and F. Ceccherini
- Subjects
Nuclear and High Energy Physics ,Materials science ,Mechanical Engineering ,chemistry.chemical_element ,Plasma ,Nuclear Energy and Engineering ,chemistry ,Getter ,Field-reversed configuration ,General Materials Science ,Lithium ,Atomic physics ,Neutral density filter ,Scaling ,Civil and Structural Engineering - Abstract
C-2 is a unique, large compact-toroid (CT) device at Tri Alpha Energy that produces field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasmas by colliding and merging oppositely directed CTs. Significant progress has recently been made on C-2, achieving ~5 ms stable plasmas with a dramatic improvement in confinement, far beyond the prediction from the conventional FRC scaling. This stable, long-lived FRC plasma state is called the high-performance FRC (HPF) regime. The key approaches to achieve the HPF regime are as follows: (i) dynamic FRC formation by collision/merging of super-Alfvenic CTs, (ii) effective control of stability and transport by end-on plasma guns and neutral-beam (NB) injection, and (iii) active wall conditioning using titanium and lithium gettering systems. Moreover, further improvement in FRC confinement has been obtained with improved open-field-line plasma properties such as a lower fluctuation level, reduced transport rates in radial/axial directions, and lower background neutral density a...
- Published
- 2015