Unstructured mesh technologies for massively parallel simulation and data analysis of magnetically confined plasmas
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70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
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Microcalorimeter measurement of x-ray spectra from a high-temperature magnetically confined plasma
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Engineering - Other instrumentation, Physics - Pla↗
Discrete Calderon's projections on parallelepipeds and their application to computing exterior magnetic fields for FRC plasmas
Confining dense plasma in a field reversed configuration (FRC) is considered a promising approach to fusion. Numerical simulation of this process requires setting artificial boundary conditions (ABCs) for the magnetic field because whereas the plasma itself occupies a bounded region (within the FRC coils), the field extends from this region all the way to infinity. If the plasma is modeled using single fluid magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), then the exterior magnetic field can be considered quasi-static. This field has a scalar potential governed by the Laplace equation. The quasi-static ABC for the magnetic field is obtained using the method of difference potentials, in the form of a discrete Calderon boundary equation with projection on the artificial boundary shaped as a parallelepiped. The Calderon projection itself is computed by convolution with the discrete fundamental solution on the three-dimensional Cartesian grid.
70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
Resonance between heat-carrying electrons and Langmuir waves in inertial confinement fusion plasmas
Abstract Not Provided
ASTRO↗
Application of spatially resolved high resolution crystal spectrometry to inertial confinement fusion plasmas
High resolution ({lambda}/{Delta}{lambda}{approx} 10 000) 1D imaging x-ray spectroscopy using a spherically bent crystal and a 2D hybrid pixel array detector is used world wide for Doppler measurements of ion-temperature and plasma flow-velocity profiles in magnetic confinement fusion plasmas. Meter sized plasmas are diagnosed with cm spatial resolution and 10 ms time resolution. This concept can also be used as a diagnostic of small sources, such as inertial confinement fusion plasmas and targets on x-ray light source beam lines, with spatial resolution of micrometers, as demonstrated by laboratory experiments using a 250-{mu}m {sup 55}Fe source, and by ray-tracing calculations. Throughput calculations agree with measurements, and predict detector counts in the range 10{sup -8}-10{sup -6} times source x-rays, depending on crystal reflectivity and spectrometer geometry. Results of the lab demonstrations, application of the technique to the National Ignition Facility (NIF), and predictions of performance on NIF will be presented.
46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
Use of intrinsic hysteresis for the active control of internal transport barriers in magnetically confined fusion plasmas
In magnetically confined fusion devices, control of internal transport barriers (ITBs) is important both to enhance and suppress the turbulent transport to improve confinement control. Barrier control should allow for the improvement of confinement to aid in achieving the needed fusion criteria while also permitting the degradation of confinement to control profiles and clean the device by moving out the impurities accumulated near the core. In this work, we present a novel control scenario that takes advantage of the hysteresis intrinsic to transport barriers to easily cycle through enhanced and degraded confinement regimes. The control scenario is illustrated using a five-field simplified transport model for an ITB using typical parameters of a neutral beam injection-heated DIII-D tokamak discharge. Pellets and ion cyclotron resonance frequency power are used as control knobs for this active control scenario. These knobs adequately modify at will the local gradients and, therefore, the growth rates and shearing rates, allowing for easy and efficient control of the barrier by taking advantage of the barrier hysteresis. The result is a control cycle that could be operated with a relatively small amount of power in high performance regimes which, nowadays, typically require large power to control. It may also have advantages to avoid, or at least ameliorate, the appearance of magnetohydrodynamic instabilities in the barrier region.
70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
Instability and Target Design in a Z-Pinch Driven Pulsed Fission / Fusion Engine
Advanced forms of propulsion are required to drastically improve upon the limits of existing technology and enable deep space exploration. Nuclear reactors, both fission and fusion, have great potential as systems with high energy density for spacecraft propulsion. There are a variety of nuclear propulsion concepts that have been proposed over the last several decades. Some of these rely on the confinement of plasmas by both magnetic and inertial means. When discussing the plasma confinement one must consider the stability of the system. The conditions of the plasma dictate the burn rate of the nuclear fuel; therefore, the plasma must maintain a minimum set of conditions in order to achieve an adequate burn. Instabilities limit plasma confinement through growing fluctuations in density and pressure. This results in turbulent mixing and loss of confinement. Thus it is desirable to find ways of managing the impact of instabilities that arise in order for a sufficient burn of the fuel such that surplus energy can be converted into a propulsive force. Note that the same instabilities plague the confinement of plasmas for terrestrial power generation. Over the last several years there has been research relating to the development of a Pulsed Fission-Fusion Engine (PuFF) conducted by the authors and others at their respective institutions. The propulsion system concept centers on the use of a z-pinch to compress a plasma in order to induce nuclear reactions. The plasma along with the additional energy released by the fission and fusion processes is expanded with a magnetic nozzle to produce thrust. The concept, if developed, is expected to have an improvement in specific impulse of several orders of magnitude in comparison with chemical propulsion systems. The z-pinch has been explored in the past as a method to confine a plasma via magnetic confinement fusion (MCF) for power generation. It suffers; however, from instabilities that so far have prevented break even conditions.
Taylor, Brian↗
Development of a tunable Fabry-Perot etalon-based near-infrared interference spectrometer for measurement of the HeI 2{sup 3}S-2{sup 3}P spectral line shape in magnetically confined torus plasmas
In magnetically confined torus plasmas, the local emission intensity, temperature, and flow velocity of atoms in the inboard and outboard scrape-off layers can be separately measured by a passive emission spectroscopy assisted by observation of the Zeeman splitting in their spectral line shape. To utilize this technique, a near-infrared interference spectrometer optimized for the observation of the helium 2{sup 3}S–2{sup 3}P transition spectral line (wavelength 1083 nm) has been developed. The applicability of the technique to actual torus devices is elucidated by calculating the spectral line shapes expected to be observed in LHD and QUEST (Q-shu University Experiment with Steady State Spherical Tokamak). In addition, the Zeeman effect on the spectral line shape is measured using a glow-discharge tube installed in a superconducting magnet.
46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
Confinement of a plasma by a rotating field. The stability of the plasma-generator system
Low frequency stability of plasmas confined by rotating magnetic fields
Weibel, E. S.↗
Masked-backlighter technique used to simultaneously image x-ray absorption and x-ray emission from an inertial confinement fusion plasma
A method to simultaneously image both the absorption and the self-emission of an imploding inertial confinement fusion plasma has been demonstrated on the OMEGA Laser System. The technique involves the use of a high-Z backlighter, half of which is covered with a low-Z material, and a high-speed x-ray framing camera aligned to capture images backlit by this masked backlighter. Two strips of the four-strip framing camera record images backlit by the high-Z portion of the backlighter, while the other two strips record images aligned with the low-Z portion of the backlighter. The emission from the low-Z material is effectively eliminated by a high-Z filter positioned in front of the framing camera, limiting the detected backlighter emission to that of the principal emission line of the high-Z material. As a result, half of the images are of self-emission from the plasma and the other half are of self-emission plus the backlighter. The advantage of this technique is that the self-emission simultaneous with backlighter absorption is independently measured from a nearby direction. The absorption occurs only in the high-Z backlit frames and is either spatially separated from the emission or the self-emission is suppressed by filtering, or by using a backlighter much brighter than the self-emission, or by subtraction. The masked-backlighter technique has been used on the OMEGA Laser System to simultaneously measure the emission profiles and the absorption profiles of polar-driven implosions.
46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
Improvement of plasma energy confinement in tokamak under radiative cooling of the edge plasma
Improvement of plasma energy confinement in the T-10 tokamak by injection of impurity gases was studied experimentally. Injection of Ne and He in the ohmic and ECR heating regimes allows one to separate the dependences of energy confinement on the plasma density and on the edge plasma cooling rate. It is shown that the well-known dependence of the energy confinement time on the plasma density is, in fact, the dependence on the radiative loss power. This phenomenon can be explained by plasma self-organization. The experiments are described by a thermodynamic model for self-organized plasma in which the transport coefficient depends on the difference between the actual and self-consistent pressure profiles. The reduction in the heat flux at the plasma edge due to radiative cooling leads to a decrease in the transport coefficient in this region and, accordingly, improves energy confinement. Results of approximate model calculations for experiments with Ne injection are presented.
70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
Iso-nuclear tungsten dielectronic recombination rates for use in magnetically-confined fusion plasmas
Under the auspices of the IAEA Atomic and Molecular Data Center and the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute, our assembled group of authors has reviewed the current state of dielectronic recombination (DR) rate coefficients for various ion stages of tungsten (W). Subsequent recommendations were based upon available experimental data, first-principle calculations carried out in support of this paper and from available recombination data within existing atomic databases. If a recommendation was possible, data were compiled, evaluated and fitted to a functional form with associated uncertainty information retained, where available. This paper also considers the variation of the W fractional abundance due to the underlying atomic data when employing different data sets.
70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
Neutron Time-of-Flight Measurements of Charged-Particle Energy Loss in Inertial Confinement Fusion Plasmas
Neutron spectra from secondary 3 H(d,n)α reactions produced by an implosion of a deuterium-gas capsule at the National Ignition Facility have been measured with order-of-magnitude improvements in statistics and resolution over past experiments. Furthermore, these new data and their sensitivity to the energy loss of fast tritons emitted from thermal 2 H(d,p) 3 H reactions enable the first statistically significant investigation of charged-particle stopping via the emitted neutron spectrum. Radiation-hydrodynamic simulations, constrained to match a number of observables from the implosion, were used to predict the neutron spectra while employing two different energy loss models. This analysis represents the first test of stopping models under inertial confinement fusion conditions, covering plasma temperatures of k B T ≈ 1–4 keV and particle densities of n ≈ (12–2) × 10 24 cm –3 . Under these conditions, we find significant deviations of our data from a theory employing classical collisions whereas the theory including quantum diffraction agrees with our data.
70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
PARVMEC: An Efficient, Scalable Implementation of the Variational Moments Equilibrium Code
The ability to sustain magnetically confined plasma in a state of stable equilibrium is crucial for optimal and cost-effective operations of fusion devices like tokamaks and stellarators. The Variational Moments Equilibrium Code (VMEC) is the de-facto serial application used by fusion scientists to compute magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equilibria and study the physics of three dimensional plasmas in confined configurations. Modern fusion energy experiments have larger system scales with more interactive experimental workflows, both demanding faster analysis turnaround times on computational workloads that are stressing the capabilities of sequential VMEC. In this paper, we present PARVMEC, an efficient, parallel version of its sequential counterpart, capable of scaling to thousands of processors on distributed memory machines. PARVMEC is a non-linear code, with multiple numerical physics modules, each with its own computational complexity. A detailed speedup analysis supported by scaling results on 1,024 cores of a Cray XC30 supercomputer is presented. Depending on the mode of PARVMEC execution, speedup improvements of one to two orders of magnitude are reported. PARVMEC equips fusion scientists for the first time with a state-of-theart capability for rapid, high fidelity analyses of magnetically confined plasmas at unprecedented scales.
Seal, Sudip K↗
Effect of electron-cyclotron resonance plasma heating conditions on the low-frequency modulation of the gyrotron power at the L-2M stellarator
Low-frequency modulation of the gyrotron power at the L-2M stellarator was studied at different modes of plasma confinement. The plasma was heated at the second harmonic of the electron gyrofrequency. The effect of reflection of gyrotron radiation from the region of electron-cyclotron resonance plasma heating, as well as of backscattering of gyrotron radiation from fluctuations of the plasma density, on the modulation of the gyrotron power was investigated.
70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
Three-dimensional diagnostics and measurements of inertial confinement fusion plasmas
Recent inertial confinement fusion measurements have highlighted the importance of 3D asymmetry effects on implosion performance. One prominent example is the bulk drift velocity of the deuterium–tritium plasma undergoing fusion (“hotspot”), v HS . Upgrades to the National Ignition Facility neutron time-of-flight diagnostics now provide v HS to better than 1 part in 10 4 and enable cross correlations with other measurements. Here we present the impact of v HS on the neutron yield, downscatter ratio, apparent ion temperature, electron temperature, and 2D x-ray emission. The necessary improvements to diagnostic suites to take these measurements are also detailed. The benefits of using cross-diagnostic analysis to test hotspot models and theory are discussed, and cross-shot trends are shown.
47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
Development of a Direct Neutral Density Diagnostic for Fusion Edge Plasmas
As magnetically confined plasmas progress towards ignition and long pulse experiments, measurement and control of the neutral density in the plasma edge has become a critical issue for stability, formation of transport barriers, and fueling. Recent experiments by our research group have demonstrated that is possible to use two-photon absorption laser induced fluorescence (TA-LIF) to directly measure the density of neutral hydrogen in helicon sources and in the HIT-SI3 spheromak. While those experiments validated key elements of a diagnostic system that would enable similar measurements in tokamak plasmas, they did not fully address the issue of performance optimization in the presence of intense background light at the fluorescence wavelength and they also identified a number of other issues that must be resolved before successful TALIF neutral density measurements in a tokamak are likely to be achieved. Additional specific concerns raised during design reviews with the leadership of the DIII-D tokamak facility included: the minimum detection threshold for this TALIF diagnostic (currently ~ 5 x 10 15 m -3 ) and the rate at which neutral density measurements could be obtained. Improving the system performance to reduce the minimum detection threshold and demonstrating a faster rate of density determination are required to advance this diagnostic to the level where it could be considered for implementation on a major tokamak facility in the USA. The key issues that will be addressed through additional technological development are: validation of a new, chromatic aberration-free, xenon calibration scheme; increasing the output power of the laser; and suppression of background emission at the fluorescence wavelength through optimization of the collection optics and gating of the photomultiplier detector with a goal of obtaining a minimum detection threshold of 5 x 10 14 m -3 . Another key technological development, so far only tested in helicon source experiments, is the validation of Doppler-free TALIF as a means of obtaining higher speed, calibrated, neutral density measurements in tokamak-like conditions at the full cadence of the pulsed TALIF laser. In this work, we propose to complete these technological advancements through installation and testing of our prototype TALIF system on the proto-MPEX experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The proto-MPEX facility will provide plasma conditions similar to the edge plasma of a major tokamak experiment but with pulse lengths and pulse repetition rates ideally suited for extensive development of a TALIF neutral density diagnostic. Measurement of the absolute neutral density in the edge of a magnetically confined plasma is necessary for plasma density control; calculation of charge-exchange power losses; control of plasma-wall interactions; determination of the braking of plasma flow; determination of the fuel mixture in deuterium-tritium plasma; and understanding the dynamics of the divertor region in the plasma edge. In terms of potential impact on the worldwide fusion program, we note that in burning plasma experiments, such as ITER, a 100 mJ/pulse Doppler-free TALIF diagnostic should be capable of directly measuring the deuterium/tritium (D/T) isotope ratio in the outer 0.5 to 1.0 m of the plasma radius. The D/T ratio is a critically important parameter for the control and optimization of burning plasmas. Therefore, development of the diagnostic system proposed here is also relevant to long-term US participation in diagnostic development for large tokamaks.
70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
Inertially confined fusion plasmas dominated by alpha-particle self-heating [Alpha-particle self-heating dominated inertially confined fusion plasmas]
Alpha-particle self-heating, the process of deuterium–tritium fusion reaction products depositing their kinetic energy locally within a fusion reaction region and thus increasing the temperature in the reacting region, is essential for achieving ignition in a fusion system. Here, we report new inertial confinement fusion experiments where the alpha-particle heating of the plasma is dominant with the fusion yield produced exceeding the fusion yield from the work done on the fuel (pressure times volume change) by a factor of two or more. These experiments have achieved the highest yield (26 ± 0.5 kJ) and stagnation pressures ( ≍ 220 ± 40 Gbar) of any facility-based inertial confinement fusion experiments, although they are still short of the pressures required for ignition on the National Ignition Facility (~300–400 Gbar). Finally, these experiments put us in a new part of parameter space that has not been extensively studied so far because it lies between the no-alpha-particle-deposition regime and ignition.
70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗