News

Getting ready for new experimental campaigns at JET

Mervi Mantsinen and Dani Gallart at JET.

The Joint European Torus (JET) is getting ready for a new campaign with deuterium (D) fuel mixture at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), UK. After this D campaign, a tritium (T) campaign is planned to follow. These campaigns are made in preparation for the eventual D-T campaign with a fusion reactor relevant 50%-50% D-T fuel mixture. It will be the second D-T campaign at JET; the first D-T campaign at JET was carried out in 1997. The production and physics of born alphas (He-4) at 3.5MeV due to D-T fusion reactions will be tested and assessed with the ITER-like-wall made of beryllium (Be) and tungsten (W).

As high-performance discharges are sought, the control of high-Z impurity transport will play a key role during this campaign. One of the main goals is to keep the impurity accumulation at the plasma core low. In this regard, large efforts have been carried out by the experimental and modelling team during the preparation of these campaigns.

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EUROfusion planning meeting & visit to Marconi supercomputer

WPCD Annual Planning Meeting attendants at CINECA, Bologna (Italy).

Last week two of our group members, Albert Gutiérrez and Ignacio López de Arbina, attended the Annual Planning Meeting of the EUROfusion Work Package Code Development for Integrated Modelling (WPCD). The event took place at the CINECA headquarters in Bologna, Italy, a computing center that host among others the Marconi supercomputer which devotes a significant part of its computing power to the nuclear fusion community.

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Research stay at Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), Garching, Germany

Our PhD student Allah Rakha is back at BSC after successfully completing a six-month research stay at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), Germany. IPP is a leading institute in Europe for both theoretical and experimental studies of fusion plasmas, equipped with two state-of-the-art fusion experimental devices, the ASDEX Upgrade (AUG) tokamak and the world’s largest stellarator Wendelstein 7-X.

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Research stay with experiments on AUG

View from the AUG control room during last weeks experiments.

Our group leader Dr. Mervi Mantsinen and PhD student Dani Gallart worked last week at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP)  at Garching, Germany. They participated in the experiments on the ASDEX Upgrade (AUG) tokamak as part of the EUROfusion 2018 Medium Size Tokamak (MST1) experimental campaign.

Mervi was the scientific coordinator of the experiments that  successfully proved the use of waves tuned to the third harmonic ion cyclotron resonance of deuterium (D) to heat the plasma. Various diagnostics including neutron detectors and neutral particle analysers confirmed the presence of energetic D ions accelerated by resonant wave-particle interaction.

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Collaborating with CIEMAT and Aalto University on modelling of fast ions in TJ-II stellarator

TJ-II stellarator control room (Photo: CIEMAT)

The Fusion Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the National Fusion Laboratory at CIEMAT (Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas) have actively collaborated for more than ten years. Over the recent years, the collaboration has focused on the modelling of plasma instabilities in the CIEMAT-based TJ-II stellarator device.  It has recently resulted in a publication in the Nuclear Fusion journal and a related follow-up project on the modelling of energetic particle behaviour in TJ-II plasmas.

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