One Way to Improve a Fusion Reaction: Use Weaknesses as Strengths
taylorvich writes:
https://phys.org/news/2024-03-fusion-reaction-weaknesses-strengths.html
In the Japanese art of Kintsugi, an artist takes the broken shards of a bowl and fuses them back together with gold to make a final product more beautiful than the original.
That idea is inspiring a new approach to managing plasma, the super-hot state of matter, for use as a power source. Scientists are using the imperfections in magnetic fields that confine a reaction to improve and enhance the plasma in an approach outlined in a paper in the journal Nature Communications.
"This approach allows you to maintain a high-performance plasma, controlling instabilities in the core and the edge of the plasma simultaneously. That simultaneous control is particularly important and difficult to do. That's what makes this work special," said Joseph Snipes of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). He is PPPL's deputy head of the Tokamak Experimental Science Department and was a co-author of the paper.
PPPL Physicist Seong-Moo Yang led the research team, which spans various institutions in the U.S. and South Korea. Yang says this is the first time any research team has validated a systematic approach to tailoring magnetic field imperfections to make the plasma suitable for use as a power source. These magnetic field imperfections are known as error fields.
[...] Error fields are typically caused by minuscule defects in the magnetic coils of the device that holds the plasma, which is called a tokamak. Until now, error fields were only seen as a nuisance because even a very small error field could cause a plasma disruption that halts fusion reactions and can damage the walls of a fusion vessel. Consequently, fusion researchers have spent considerable time and effort meticulously finding ways to correct error fields.
[...] This study demonstrates that adjusting the error fields can simultaneously stabilize both the core and the edge of the plasma. By carefully controlling the magnetic fields produced by the tokamak's coils, the researchers could suppress edge instabilities, also known as edge localized modes (ELMs), without causing disruptions or a substantial loss of confinement.
More information: SeongMoo Yang et al, Tailoring tokamak error fields to control plasma instabilities and transport, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45454-1
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