Engineering topics

Glass, F.

Publications and source records attributed to Glass, F..

5 records

DOE OSTI2024

Broadening of the Divertor Heat Flux Profile in High Confinement Tokamak Fusion Plasmas with Edge Pedestals Limited by Turbulence in DIII-D

Multimachine empirical scaling predicts an extremely narrow heat exhaust layer in future high magnetic field tokamaks, producing high power densities that require mitigation. Here, in the experiments presented, the width of this exhaust layer is nearly doubled using actuators to increase turbulent transport in the plasma edge. This is achieved in low collisionality, high confinement edge pedestals with their gradients limited by turbulent transport instead of large-scale, coherent instabilities. The exhaust heat flux profile width and divertor leg diffusive spreading both double as a high frequency band of turbulent fluctuations propagating in the electron diamagnetic direction doubles in amplitude. The results are quantitatively reproduced in electromagnetic XGC particle-in-cell simulations which show the heat flux carried by electrons emerges to broaden the heat flux profile, directly supported by Langmuir probe measurements.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

DOE OSTI2023

Measurements and modeling of type-I and type-II ELMs heat flux to the DIII-D divertor

Type-I and type-II edge-localized-modes (ELMs) heat flux profiles measured at the DIII-D divertor feature a peak in the vicinity of the strike-point and a plateau in the scrape-off-layer (SOL), which extends to the first wall. The plateau is present in attached and detached divertors and it is found to originate with plasma bursts upstream in the SOL. The integrated ELM heat flux is distributed at ~65% in the peak and ~35% in this plateau. The parallel loss model, currently used at ITER to predict power loads to the walls, is benchmarked using these results in the primary and secondary divertors with unprecedented constraints using experimental input data for ELM size, radial velocity, energy, electron temperature and density, heat flux footprints and number of filaments. The model can reproduce the experimental near-SOL peak within ~20%, but cannot match the SOL plateau. Employing a two-component approach for the ELM radial velocity, as guided by intermittent data, the full radial heat flux profile can be well matched. The ELM-averaged radial velocity at the separatrix, which explains profile widening, increases from ~0.2 km s –1 in attached to ~0.8 km s –1 in detached scenarios, as the ELM filaments' path becomes electrically disconnected from the sheath at the target. The results presented here indicate filaments fragmentation as a possible mechanism for ELM transport to the far-SOL and provide evidence on the beneficial role of detachment to mitigate ELM flux in the divertor far-SOL. However, these findings imply that wall regions far from the strike points in future machines should be designed to withstand significant heat flux, even for small-ELM regimes.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

DOE OSTI2022

Studies of EC pre-ionization in DIII-D to support development of ITER plasma initiation

New experiments have been conducted at DIII-D to improve the physics understanding of plasma initiation assisted by electron cyclotron (EC) wave injection, allowing better extrapolation to ITER. This has been achieved by applying an EC pulse prior to start of the inductive plasma initiation (i.e. the generation of a loop voltage). A pre-plasma was formed during the EC pulse that was characterized in terms of the maximum density and temperature. Parametric scans were performed to study the influence of the EC injected power, EC injection angle, and pre-fill gas pressure on the pre-plasma creation process. These experiments showed that pre-ionized plasma of good quality can have a significant effect on the subsequent V loop induced plasma initiation process, i.e. a high density pre-plasma, increases the plasma current rise and speed at which ionization is achieved when the V loop is applied. Here, a good quality pre-plasma is one that achieved a significant degree of ionization, mainly obtained by providing sufficient ECH power in DIII-D of the order of 1 MW. It was found that a minimum EC power of 0.5 MW was required in DIII-D to create ionization, and this would scale to a minimum power of roughly 6.5 MW for ITER.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

DOE OSTI2021

Diverted Negative Triangularity plasmas on DIII–D: The benefit of high confinement without the liability of an edge pedestal

Diverted discharges at negative triangularity on the DIII-D tokamak sustain normalized confinement and pressure levels typical of standard H-mode scenarios (H 98y,2 ≅1, β N ≅3) without developing an edge pressure pedestal, despite the auxiliary power far exceeding the L → H power threshold expected from conventional scaling laws. The power degradation of confinement is substantially weaker than the ITER-89P scaling, resulting in a confinement factor that improves with increasing auxiliary power. Furthermore, the absence of the edge pedestal is beneficial in several aspects, such as eliminating the need for active mitigation or suppression of edge localized modes, low impurity retention and a reconstructed scrape-off layer heat flux width at the mid-plane that exceeds the ITPA multi-machine scaling law by up to 50%. Together with technological advantages granted by placing the divertor at larger radii, plasmas at Negative Triangularity without an edge pedestal feature both core confinement and power handling characteristics that are potentially suitable for operation in future fusion reactors.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

DOE OSTI2021

Measuring the electron temperature and identifying plasma detachment using machine learning and spectroscopy

A machine learning approach has been implemented to measure the electron temperature directly from the emission spectra of a tokamak plasma. This approach utilized a neural network (NN) trained on a dataset of 1865 time slices from operation of the DIII-D tokamak using extreme ultraviolet/vacuum ultraviolet emission spectroscopy matched with high-accuracy divertor Thomson scattering measurements of the electron temperature, T e . This NN is shown to be particularly good at predicting T e at low temperatures (T e < 10 eV) where the NN demonstrated a mean average error of less than 1 eV. Trained to detect plasma detachment in the tokamak divertor, a NN classifier was able to correctly identify detached states (T e < 5 eV) with a 99% accuracy (an F 1 score of 0.96) at an acquisition rate 10× faster than the Thomson scattering measurement. The performance of the model is understood by examining a set of 4800 theoretical spectra generated using collisional radiative modeling that was also used to predict the performance of a low-cost spectrometer viewing nitrogen emission in the visible wavelengths. Furthermore, these results provide a proof-of-principle that low-cost spectrometers leveraged with machine learning can be used to boost the performance of more expensive diagnostics on fusion devices and be used independently as a fast and accurate T e measurement and detachment classifier.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗