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1. A reduced-turbulence regime in the Large Helical Device upon injection of low-Z materials powders

Author(s):
Nespoli, Federico; Tanaka, Kenji; Masuzaki, Suguru; Ashikawa, Naoko; Shoji, Mamoru; Gilson, Erik; Lunsford, Robert; Oishi, Tetsutarou; Ida, Katsumi; Yoshinuma, Mikirou; Takemura, Yuki; Kinoshita, Toshiki; Motojima, Gen; Osakabe, Masaki; Kenmochi, Naoki; Kawamura, Gakushi; Suzuki, Chihiro; Nagy, Alex; Bortolon, Alessandro; Pablant, Novimir; Mollen, Albert; Tamura, Naoki; Gates, David; Morisaki, Tomohiro
Abstract:
Recently an improved confinement regime, characterized by reduced turbulent fluctuations has been observed in the Large Helical Device upon the injection of boron powder into the plasma (Nespoli et al 2022 Nat. Phys.18 350–56). In this article, we report in more detail the experimental observations of increased plasma temperature and the decrease of turbulent fluctuations across the plasma cross section, on an extended database. In particular, we compare powders of different materials (B, C, BN), finding similar temperature improvement and turbulence response for the three cases. Modeling of the powder penetration into the plasma and of neoclassical electric field and fluxes support the interpretation of the experimental results. Additionally, we report evidence of the temperature improvement increasing with powder injection rates and decreasing for both increasing density and heating power. Though, plasma turbulence response varies depending on the initial conditions of the plasma, making it difficult to draw an inclusive description of the phenomenon.
Type:
Dataset
Issue Date:
19 May 2023

2. A novel scheme for error field correction in permanent magnet stellarators

Author(s):
Rutkowski, Adam; Hammond, Kenneth; Zhu, Caoxiang; Gates, David; Chambliss, Amelia
Abstract:
Stellarators offer a promising path towards fusion reactors, but their design and construction are complicated by stringent tolerance requirements on highly complex 3D coils. A potential way to simplify the engineering requirements for stellarators is to use simple planar toroidal field coils along with permanent magnet arrays to generate shaping fields. In order to ensure sufficient field accuracy while minimizing engineering complexity and system cost, new techniques are required to correct the field produced by the permanent magnet arrays to within requirements set by plasma physics. This work describes a novel correction method developed for this purpose. This analysis is applied to the design of a quasi-axisymmetric stellarator that employs a combination of permanent magnets and planar toroidal field coils to generate its magnetic field. Analysis techniques and initial results using the method for error correction on a proposed permanent magnet stellarator are shown, and it is demonstrated that the method successfully meets the design requirements of the project.
Type:
Dataset
Issue Date:
7 December 2022

3. Observation of a reduced-turbulence regime with boron powder injection in a stellarator

Author(s):
Nespoli, Federico; Masuzaki, Suguru; Tanaka, Kenji; Ashikawa, Naoko; Shoji, Mamoru; Gilson, Erik; Lunsford, Robert; Oishi, Tetsutarou; Ida, Katsumi; Yoshinuma, Mikirou; Takemura, Yuki; Kinoshita, Toshiki; Motojima, Gen; Kenmochi, Naoki; Kawamura, Gakushi; Suzuki, Chihiro; Nagy, Alex; Bortolon, Alessandro; Pablant, Novimir; Mollen, Albert; Tamura, Naoki; Gates, David; Morisaki, Tomohiro
Abstract:
In state-of-the-art stellarators, turbulence is a major cause of the degradation of plasma confinement. To maximize confinement, which eventually determines the amount of nuclear fusion reactions, turbulent transport needs to be reduced. Here we report the observation of a confinement regime in a stellarator plasma that is characterized by increased confinement and reduced turbulent fluctuations. The transition to this regime is driven by the injection of submillimetric boron powder grains into the plasma. With the line-averaged electron density being kept constant, we observe a substantial increase of stored energy and electron and ion temperatures. At the same time, the amplitude of the plasma turbulent fluctuations is halved. While lower frequency fluctuations are damped, higher frequency modes in the range between 100 and 200 kHz are excited. We have observed this regime for different heating schemes, namely with both electron and ion cyclotron resonant radio frequencies and neutral beams, for both directions of the magnetic field and both hydrogen and deuterium plasmas.
Type:
Dataset
Issue Date:
10 January 2022

4. Design of an arrangement of cubic magnets for a quasi-axisymmetric stellarator experiment

Author(s):
Hammond, Kenneth; Zhu, Caoxiang; Corrigan, Keith; Gates, David; Lown, Robert; Mercurio, Robert; Qian, Tony; Zarnstorff, Michael
Abstract:
The usage of permanent magnets to shape the confining field of a stellarator has the potential to reduce or eliminate the need for non-planar coils. As a proof-of-concept for this idea, we have developed a procedure for designing an array of cubic permanent magnets that works in tandem with a set of toroidal-field coils to confine a stellarator plasma. All of the magnets in the design are constrained to have identical geometry and one of three polarization types in order to simplify fabrication while still producing sufficient field accuracy. We present some of the key steps leading to the design, including the geometric arrangement of the magnets around the device, the procedure for optimizing the polarizations according to three allowable magnet types, and the choice of magnet types to be used. We apply these methods to design an array of rare-Earth permanent magnets that can be paired with a set of planar toroidal-field coils to confine a quasi-axisymmetric plasma with a toroidal magnetic field strength of about 0.5 T on axis.
Type:
Dataset
Issue Date:
2022

5. Energetic particle optimization of quasi-axisymmetric stellarator equilibria

Author(s):
LeViness, Alexandra; Schmitt, John; Lazerson, Samuel; Bader, Aaron; Faber, Benjamin; Hammond, Kenneth; Gates, David
Abstract:
An important goal of stellarator optimization is to achieve good confinement of energetic particles such as, in the case of a reactor, alphas created by Deuterium-Tritium (D-T) fusion. In this work, a fixed-boundary stellarator equilibrium was re-optimized for energetic particle confinement via a two-step process: first, by minimizing deviations from quasi-axisymmetry (QA) on a single flux surface near the mid-radius, and secondly by maintaining this improved quasi-axisymmetry while minimizing the analytical quantity ΓC , which represents the angle between magnetic flux surfaces and contours of J||, the second adiabatic invariant. This was performed multiple times, resulting in a group of equilibria with significantly reduced energetic particle losses, as evaluated by Monte Carlo simulations of alpha particles in scaled-up versions of the equilibria. This is the first time that energetic particle losses in a QA stellarator have successfully been reduced by optimizing ΓC . The relationship between energetic particle losses and metrics such as QA error (Eqa) and ΓC in this set of equilibria were examined via statistical methods and a nearly linear relationship between volume-averaged ΓC and prompt particle losses was found.
Type:
Dataset
Issue Date:
2022

7. Initial operation and data processing on a system for real-time evaluation of Thomson scattering signals on the Large Helical Device

Author(s):
Hammond, K. C.; Laggner, F. M.; Diallo, A.; Doskoczynski, S.; Freeman, C.; Funaba, H.; Gates, D.A.; Rozenblat, R.; Tchilinguirian, G.; Xing, Z.; Yamada, I.; Yasuhara, R.; Zimmer, G.; Kolemen, E.
Abstract:
A scalable system for real-time analysis of electron temperature and density based on signals from the Thomson scattering diagnostic, initially developed for and installed on the NSTX-U experiment, was recently adapted for the Large Helical Device (LHD) and operated for the first time during plasma discharges. During its initial operation run, it routinely recorded and processed signals for four spatial points at the laser repetition rate of 30 Hz, well within the system's rated capability for 60 Hz. We present examples of data collected from this initial run and describe subsequent adaptations to the analysis code to improve the fidelity of the temperature calculations.
Type:
Dataset
Issue Date:
2021

8. First impurity powder injection experiments in LHD

Author(s):
Nespoli F., Ashikawa N., Gilson E.P., Lunsford R., Masuzaki S., Shoji M., Oishi T., Suzuki C., Nagy A., Mollen A., Pablant N.A., Ida K., Yoshinuma M., Tamura N., Gates D.A., Morisaki T., and the LHD experiment group
Abstract:
Injection of impurities in the form of sub-millimeter powder grains is performed for the first time in the Large Helical Device (LHD) plasma, employing the Impurity Powder Dropper (IPD) [A. Nagy et al., RSI 2018], developed and built by PPPL. Controlled amounts of boron (B) and boron nitride (BN) powder are injected into the helical plasma. Visible camera imaging, UV and charge exchange spectroscopy measurements show that the injected impurities effectively penetrate into the plasma in two different magnetic configurations.The prompt effects of the impurities on the plasma are characterized as the injection rate is scanned. The injected impurities provide a supplemental electron source, causing the plasma density to increase, together with the radiated power. Beneficial effects on the confined plasma temperature are observed at low plasma densities, due to an increased efficiency in NBI power absorption. For $n_{e,av}<10^{19}m^{-3}$ the powder grains penetrate deeper into the plasma, as they can be less effectively deflected by the plasma flow in the divertor leg, which they have to cross first as they are injected from the top of the machine.In this case, the created B ions are observed to move outwards from UV spectroscopy and charge exchange measurements, due to the outwards direction of the radial electric field. This makes low density plasmas a better candidate for powder boronization techniques.
Type:
Dataset
Issue Date:
November 2020

9. Geometric concepts for stellarator permanent magnet arrays

Author(s):
Hammond, K. C.; Zhu, C.; Brown, T.; Corrigan, K.; Gates, D. A.; Sibilia, M.
Abstract:
The development of stellarators that use permanent magnet arrays to shape their confining magnetic fields has been a topic of recent interest, but the requirements for how such magnets must be shaped, manufactured, and assembled remain to be determined. To address these open questions, we have performed a study of geometric concepts for magnet arrays with the aid of the newly developed MAGPIE code. A proposed experiment similar to the National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) is used as a test case. Two classes of magnet geometry are explored: curved bricks that conform to a regular grid in cylindrical coordinates, and hexahedra that conform to the toroidal plasma geometry. In addition, we test constraints on the magnet polarization. While magnet configurations constrained to be polarized normally to a toroidal surface around the plasma are unable to meet the required magnetic field parameters when subject to physical limitations on the strength of present-day magnets, configurations with unconstrained polarizations are shown to satisfy the physics requirements for a targeted plasma.
Type:
Dataset
Issue Date:
July 2020

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