Exciting news came from the area of nuclear fusion energy this past week as the team from the Alcator C-Mod tokamak announced their new world record for plasma pressure. Before getting to that, please note that you can interact with the C-Mod Team during their Ask Me Anything session hosted by Reddit on Thursday, October […]
Research
25 Years of Undergraduate Research at General Atomics
General Atomics (GA) just completed its 25th year of participation in undergraduate summer research according to a press release from General Atomics that was picked up by Engineering.com. The specific programs have changed over the years, with the present program being the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) that sees undergraduates spend ten summer weeks working on research […]
Control of Power, Torque, and Instability Drive using In-shot Variable Neutral Beam Energy in Tokamaks
The paper posted below resulted from just under three years of work at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility. The big result is that we were able to engineer a big change to the 20+ MW neutral beam system such that the beams can change their voltage during plasma shots. Lots of tokamaks use neutral beams […]
SULI Student Highlighted by DOE
I serve as a mentor in the undergraduate research program at DIII-D and one of my students from 2015 was shown as a highlight by the Department of Energy (DOE)! The highlight is from a DOE presentation dated February 19, 2016, but I only recently found it. The presentation is an overview of the multiple […]
Ion Cyclotron Emission in the Presence of Beam Ion Losses
I recently participated in the European Physical Society’s 43rd Conference on Plasma Physics where I gave an oral presentation concerning ion cyclotron emission in tokamaks. Besides having the cool abbreviation of ICE, ion cyclotron emission is interesting because it might be something that can be measured in ITER to provide an indication of the confinement of energetic ions. […]
Consideration of neutral beam prompt loss in the design of a tokamak helicon antenna
This is an engineering paper concerning the design of an antenna that was installed in the DIII-D tokamak. There are particle beams on DIII-D that provide up to 20 MW of heating power for the plasma. In this paper, we simulated a few scenarios in which an appreciable fraction of this beam power hits the […]