The BSC Fusion Group recently gained a new doctorate member! The PhD student, Tomas Bensadon, successfully defended his thesis at the beginning of the month, receiving his doctorate degree and thus joining most of the Fusion Group on having this academic certification. The presentation ended a process that started in September 2020, when Tomas joined the Fusion Group as a PhD student.
The title of the presentation was ‘Analysis of ICRF schemes for tokamaks using predictive integrated plasma modelling’. The topic of the thesis was tokamak heating, more specifically, plasma heating modelling using radio frequency waves, and all the work was carried out using computer simulations. The aims, which were achieved during this four-year project, were to use the ICRF modelling PION code integrated into the transport modelling workflow European Transport Simulator (ETS), to study the plasma parameter evolution when Ion Cyclotron Range of Frequencies (ICRF) heating is applied to the ITER tokamak non-active, hydrogen and helium plasmas. Modelling was also performed for the JET and ASDEX tokamaks in order to demonstrate the feasibility of using this PION+ETS integration on experimental data from working reactors.
The defense panel was composed of the judges; Ruben Otin works for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) at its nuclear fusion research division Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE). At UKAEA he develops numerical tools for electromagnetic analysis in nuclear fusion scenarios. Joaquín Galdón Quiroga is a postdoctoral researcher and recipient of the Marie Curie Fellowship in the Plasma and Space Sciences and Technologies Research Group at the University of Seville (US), leading the research project on high confinement scenarios at positive and negative triangularity in the SMART spherical tokamak. Shimpei Futatani is an Aggregate Professor at the University Polytechnic Catalunya (UPC), where he researches a wide-range of plasma dynamics, from the micro-scale non-linear plasma dynamics of turbulence, to the macro-scale plasma dynamics of MagnetoHydroDynamics (MHD).
The defense took place on Friday, the 5th of July, at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Enginyeria Industrial de Barcelona (ETSEIB), and it was attended by members of the Fusion Group, some family and friends. Tomas received a grade of ‘Very good’ for his thesis and will now continue to work on the project at the BSC.