PhD Florian Effenberg, who just graduated in July of this year, has presented the results of his thesis and from very recent experiments developed and coordinated by him at the 2019 venue of the Fusion Energy Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Mahatma Mandir, India. He reported on “Demonstration of Power Exhaust Control by Impurity Seeding in the Island Divertor of Wendestlein 7-X”.
The results shown demonstrate for the first time, that local impurity seeding can be utilized in the 3D plasma edge structure of the island divertor domain to accomplish control of the heat flux and fine tune the actual divertor conditions. These investigations, which formed the basis for Florian’s PhD thesis and which recently have been enhanced by new and very dedicated experiments in the compressing island divertor regime at W7-X, are important to extrapolate the heat and particle flux conditions found with the inertially cooled Test Divertor Unit (TDU) to the quasi-stationary, long pulse and high performance discharges in the next operational campaign. This campaign – starting in 2020 – will feature the High Heat Flux (HHF) Island Divertor, which will be actively water cooled and enable operaton of 30 minute long discharges. Heat flux control becomes one of the decissive elements to operate the high performance plasmas at W7-X for such long time sclaes.
The team of the 3DPSI group from UW Madison at W7-X constists out of one on-site full time scientist, one post doctoral research fellow, four graduate students and several undegraduate researchers, involved into laboratory projects at UW Madison, which are directly linked to the activities at W7-X. Five people from this group are permanently located at W7-X. This work is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy under grant DE-SC0014210 and by funding of the College of Engineering and the Department of Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
— News: 10-26-2018