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Scientists explore the power of radio waves to help control fusion reactions:
A key challenge to capturing and controlling fusion energy on Earth is maintaining the stability of plasma -- the electrically charged gas that fuels fusion reactions -- and keeping it millions of degrees hot to launch and maintain fusion reactions. This challenge requires controlling magnetic islands, bubble-like structures that form in the plasma in doughnut-shaped tokamak fusion facilities. These islands can grow, cool the plasma and trigger disruptions -- the sudden release of energy stored in the plasma -- that can halt fusion reactions and seriously damage the fusion facilities that house them.
Research by scientists at Princeton University and at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) points toward improved control of the troublesome magnetic islands in ITER, the international tokamak under construction in France, and other future fusion facilities that cannot allow large disruptions. "This research could open the door to improved control schemes previously deemed unobtainable," said Eduardo Rodriguez, a graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics and first author of a paper in Physics of Plasmas that reports the findings.
The research follows up on previous work by Allan Reiman and Nat Fisch, which identified a new effect called "RF [radio frequency] current condensation" that can greatly facilitate the stabilization of magnetic islands. The new Physics of Plasmas paper shows how to make optimal use of the effect. Reiman is a Distinguished Research Fellow at PPPL and Fisch is a Princeton University professor and Director of the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics and Associate Director of Academic Affairs at PPPL.
[...] The new paper, based on a simplified analytical model, focuses on use of RF waves to heat the islands and drive electric current that causes them to shrink and disappear. When the temperature gets sufficiently high, complicated interactions can occur that lead to the RF current condensation effect, which concentrates the current in the center of the island and can greatly enhance the stabilization. But as the temperature increases, and the gradient of the temperature between the colder edge and the hot interior of the island grows larger, the gradient can drive instabilities that make it more difficult to increase the temperature further.
Journal Reference
E. RodrÃguez, A. H. Reiman, N. J. Fisch. RF current condensation in the presence of turbulent enhanced transport, Physics of Plasmas (DOI: 10.1063/5.0001881)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday April 29 2020, @04:30PM (2 children)
Can anyone output a standard SN automobile analogy?
I usually can, but not today. Something about normal burning in a engine cylinder vs pinging, maybe, but its not that good.
The best I can do is a cooking analogy where sometimes you microwave stuff like water and it all mixes to the same temp pretty well, and sometimes you microwave the hot pocket and the outside catches fire while the inside is still frozen. And apparently cooking fusion plasma is a similar PITA.
(Score: 5, Funny) by ikanreed on Wednesday April 29 2020, @05:50PM (1 child)
Okay, so your standard car bounces up and down while you drive, right?
Well, imagine if that car exhibited non-classical motion in a Maxwellian electron space, and the probabilities of variation of change of relativistic energy per the probabilities in variation of axial movement were inversely proportional to the exponentiation of the relativistic mass of the system.
Then you turn on the radio.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @05:39PM
you forgot to allow for the phase angle concern in the imaginary wave vector surface TEM reflection due to the placement of the antenna in the window or on the fender.