#ANGELS WITH HALOS FREE#

These shifts can cause the plasma to come in contact with the chamber walls, allowing current to flow between the plasma and the walls. Halo currents occur when the plasma undergoes large shifts within the vacuum chamber caused by lack of confinement during a disruption.

The machines included ASDEX-Upgrade, in Germany Alcator C-Mod at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology DIII-D, the national fusion facility operated by General Atomics for the DOE in San Diego the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) at PPPL that has since been upgraded and the Joint European Torus (JET) in the United Kingdom. “The goal of assembling such a database is to try to understand, based on all the work that’s been done so far, whether we can project certain phenomena to next-generation devices like ITER,” Myers said. The database contains information gleaned from more than 800 total discharges by the five machines, each of which confines plasma within magnetic fields to produce fusion reactions. In the halo current study, researchers compiled a database gathered from five doughnut-shaped fusion devices known as tokamaks located around the world. Scientists are seeking to replicate fusion on Earth - creating a “star in a jar” - for a virtually inexhaustible power supply.

#ANGELS WITH HALOS FREE#

The elements are in the form of hot, charged plasma gas that consists of free electrons and atomic nuclei. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and now is a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories, another DOE national laboratory.įusion, the power that drives the sun and the stars, is the fusing of light elements that produces massive amounts of heat with the potential to generate electrical energy. The findings “place additional importance on the reliability of ITER’s disruption mitigation system, which can alleviate the effects of halo current rotation,” said Myers, who led the research project while at the U.S. “These findings provide scientific guidance to the ITER team as they work to address the disruption problem,” said physicist Clayton Myers, lead author of a paper that reported the findings in the journal Nuclear Fusion. Such currents occur during plasma disruptions and channel large amounts of electrical current from the plasma to the vessel walls.

Newswise - Halo currents - electrical currents that flow from the hot, charged plasma that fuels fusion reactions and strike the walls of fusion facilities - could damage the walls of fusion devices like ITER, the international experiment under construction in France to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power.

Angels with halos