Publications related to Magneto-inertial fusion

Error field detection and correction studies towards ITER operation

Olivier Sauter, Bernhard Sieglin, Leonardo Pigatto

In magnetic fusion devices, error field (EF) sources, spurious magnetic field perturbations, need to be identified and corrected for safe and stable (disruption-free) tokamak operation. Within Work Package Tokamak Exploitation RT04, a series of studies hav ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2024

Global fluid simulations of plasma turbulence in stellarators

António João Caeiro Heitor Coelho

In order to cope with the decarbonization challenge faced by many countries, fusion is one of the few alternatives to fossil fuels for the production of electricity. Two devices invented in the middle of the previous century have emerged as the most promis ...

EPFL2024

Divertor turbulence characterisation using Gas Puff Imaging in the TCV tokamak

Curdin Tobias Wüthrich

The performance of magnetic confinement fusion devices, such as tokamaks, is strongly correlated to the phenomena that occur in the boundary region of the plasma core that faces the wall of the device. The dominant cross-field transport mechanisms from the ...

EPFL2024

Nonlinear simulation of plasma turbulence using a gyrokinetic moment-based approach

Antoine Cyril David Hoffmann

Plasma turbulence plays a fundamental role in determining the performances of magnetic confinement fusion devices, such as tokamaks. Advances in computer science, combined with the development of efficient physical models, have significantly improved our u ...

EPFL2024

A machine-learning-based tool for last closed-flux surface reconstruction on tokamaks

Olivier Sauter, Alessandro Pau, Xiaojuan Liu, Chenguang Wan

Tokamaks allow to confine fusion plasma with magnetic fields. The prediction/reconstruction of the last closed-flux surface (LCFS) is one of the primary challenges in the control of the magnetic configuration. The evolution in time of the LCFS is determine ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2023

Negative hydrogen ion dynamics inside the plasma volume of a linear device: Estimates from particle-in-cell calculations

Ivo Furno, Alan Howling, Philippe Frédérique Bruno Guittienne, Rémy Jacquier, Riccardo Agnello

Negative hydrogen or deuterium ions are the precursor particles used to generate a high power beam of neutrals in order to heat the tokamak plasma core of magnetic fusion devices, inject current, and to some extent control instabilities. In the case of ITE ...

2021

Semi-empirical extrapolation of JET baseline and hybrid scenario fusion performance to D-T operation

Henri Weisen

We present DT neutron rate extrapolations for the baseline and hybrid scenarios of the imminent JET DTE2 experimental campaign using the Monte Carlo heating code ASCOT, using empirically scaled plasmas parameters as inputs. The scalings used are based on t ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2021

Studying the effect of non-adiabatic passing electron dynamics on microturbulence self-interaction in fusion plasmas using gyrokinetic simulations

Ajay Chandrarajan Jayalekshmi

Microturbulence driven by plasma instabilities is in most cases the dominant cause of heat and particle loss from the core of magnetic confinement fusion devices and therefore presents a major challenge in achieving burning plasma conditions. The role of p ...

EPFL2020

Nonlinear Gyrokinetic Coulomb Collision Operator

Paolo Ricci, Rogério Manuel Cabete De Jesus Jorge, Baptiste Jimmy Frei

A gyrokinetic Coulomb collision operator is derived, which is particularly useful to describe the plasma dynamics at the periphery region of magnetic confinement fusion devices. The derived operator is able to describe collisions occurring in distribution ...

Cambridge University Press2019

A wall-aligned grid generator for non-linear simulations of MHD instabilities in tokamak plasmas

Olivier Sauter, Ambrogio Fasoli, Basil Duval, Stefano Coda, Jonathan Graves, Yves Martin, Duccio Testa, Patrick Blanchard, Henri Weisen, Alessandro Pau, Mikhail Maslov, Cristian Sommariva, Federico Nespoli, Richard Pitts, David Pfefferlé, Yann Camenen, Jonathan Marc Philippe Faustin, Jan Horacek, Hamish William Patten, Javier García Hernández, Samuel Lanthaler, Marco Wischmeier, Nicola Vianello, Yao Zhou, Davide Galassi, Antonio José Pereira de Figueiredo, Liang Yao, Dalziel Joseph Wilson, Bernhard Sieglin, Otto Asunta

Block-structured mesh generation techniques have been well addressed in the CFD community for automobile and aerospace studies, and their applicability to magnetic fusion is highly relevant, due to the complexity of the plasma-facing wall structures inside ...

ELSEVIER2019

Millimeter-wave beam scattering by edge-plasma density fluctuations in TCV

Stefano Alberti, Timothy Goodman, Oulfa Chellaï, Ivo Furno, Fabio Riva, Paolo Ricci, Benoît Labit, Marcelo Baquero Ruiz, Emanuele Poli

In magnetically confined fusion devices, the use of millimeter waves (mmw) at the electron cyclotron (EC) frequencies ranges from plasma diagnostics to plasma heating, current drive and core confinement preservation. For large tokamaks such as ITER, numeri ...

2019

A moment-based model for plasma dynamics at arbitrary collisionality

Rogério Manuel Cabete De Jesus Jorge

Despite significant development over the last decades, a model able to describe the periphery region of magnetic confinement fusion devices, extending from the edge to the far scrape-off layer, is still missing. This is because this region is characterized ...

EPFL2019

Experimental study of high power mm-waves scattering by plasma turbulence in TCV plasmas

Timothy Goodman, Stefano Alberti, Ivo Furno, Marcelo Baquero Ruiz, Oulfa Chellaï, Gennady Plyushchev, Fabian Manke

Understanding the propagation of high power mm-wave in plasmas is of tremendous importance in the route to fusion considering their extensive use in magnetically confined fusion devices. Mm-beams, launched from the outside of the vessel must propagate thro ...

2017

Spectroscopic characterisation of H2 and D2 helicon plasmas generated by a resonant antenna for neutral beam applications in fusion

Basil Duval, Ivo Furno, Alan Howling, Alexander Karpushov, Philippe Frédérique Bruno Guittienne, Rémy Jacquier, Riccardo Agnello, Gennady Plyushchev, Kevin Henricus Annemarie Verhaegh, Claudio Marini

A new generation of neutral beam systems will be required in future fusion reactors, such as DEMO, able to deliver high power (up to 50 MW) with high (800 keV or higher) neutral energy. Only negative ion beams may be able to attain this performance, which ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2017

Self-consistent interaction of fast particles and ICRF waves in 3D applications of fusion plasma devices

Jonathan Marc Philippe Faustin

Tokamaks and stellarators are the most promising reactor concepts using the magnetic confinement to contain the plasma fuel. Reactors capable of sustaining deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion reactions requires the confinement of a very high temperature plasma ...

EPFL2017

Towards the optimization of a gyrokinetic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code on large-scale hybrid architectures

Laurent Villard, Stephan Brunner, Emmanuel Lanti, Trach-Minh Tran, Noé Thomas Elie Ohana, Claudio Gheller

With the aim of enabling state-of-the-art gyrokinetic PIC codes to benefit from the performance of recent multithreaded devices, we developed an application from a platform called the "PIC-engine" [1, 2, 3] embedding simplified basic features of the PIC me ...

2016

Flux-tube and global grid-based gyrokinetic simulations of plasma microturbulence and comparisons with experimental TCV measurements

Gabriele Merlo

In magnetic fusion devices, the radial transport of heat and particle largely exceeds predictions based on collisional processes. This is widely understood as a consequence of small-scale turbulence which results from the nonlinear behaviour of so-called m ...

EPFL2016

An assessment of ion temperature measurements in the boundary of the Alcator C-Mod tokamak and implications for ion fluid heat flux limiters

Christian Gabriel Theiler

The ion temperature is not frequently measured in the boundary of magnetic fusion devices. Comparisons among different ion temperature techniques and simulations are even rarer. Here we present a comparison of ion temperature measurements in the boundary o ...

2013

Local and Global Eulerian Gyrokinetic Simulations of Microturbulence in Realistic Geometry with Applications to the TCV Tokamak

Xavier Lapillonne

In magnetically confined fusion devices, the energy and particle transport is significantly larger than expected from purely collisional processes. This degraded confinement mostly results from small-scale turbulence and prevents from reaching self-sustain ...

EPFL2010

Real-time feedback control of millimeter-wave polarization for LHD

Olivier Sauter, Timothy Goodman, Federico Alberto Alfredo Felici

Electron cyclotron heating (ECH) is widely used in magnetic fusion devices, and the polarization of the injected millimeter-wave beams plays a crucial role in the propagation and absorption of the beam energy by the plasma. This polarization can be adjuste ...

AIP2009