Solo wrote:I'll be there. They've evidently made some gains in the lifetime of the FRC, but it's still dying quickly due to rapid losses, despite the large amount of injected neutral beam power. They plan to add more, but I am skeptical of how much it will buy them in performance. They are beginning to characterize the plasma in more detail with better diagnostics, and I expect they will start to discover they are plagued by anomalous transport, just as every other plasma device has been, and likely will be. The question then becomes, how bad is it, and what can be done to mitigate it. They are progressing through the stages quite rapidly though, thanks to all the previous understanding, tools, and so forth that tokamak research have produced. That, and the cash flow / pressure to meet milestones.
It would be nice Solo, if you could report about the TAE plans here after the meeting.
What TAE is trying to accomplish looks rather difficult compared to what the others are doing. Running in pulsed mode avoids a lot of the instability issues with trying to create a long lived plasma. On the other hand they have a lot of good manpower and resources.
There is another interesting abstract by TAE giving an overview of their progress. They have submitted a paper to Nature Communications, so if it is accepted for publication, then it could be rather interesting to read.
Abstract: VI2.00001 : High Performance Field Reversed Configurations
3:00 PM–3:30 PM
Author:
Michl Binderbauer
(Tri Alpha Energy, Inc.)
The field-reversed configuration (FRC) is a prolate compact toroid with poloidal magnetic fields [1]. FRCs could lead to economic fusion reactors with high power density, simple geometry, natural divertor, ease of translation, and possibly capable of burning aneutronic fuels. However, as in other high-beta plasmas, there are stability and confinement concerns. These concerns can be addressed by introducing and maintaining a significant fast ion population in the system. This is the approach adopted by TAE and implemented for the first time in the C-2 device. Studying the physics of FRCs driven by Neutral Beam (NB) injection, significant improvements were made in confinement and stability. Early C-2 discharges [2] had relatively good confinement, but global power losses exceeded the available NB input power. The addition of axially streaming plasma guns, magnetic end plugs as well as advanced surface conditioning leads to dramatic reductions in turbulence driven losses and greatly improved stability [3]. As a result, fast ion confinement significantly improved and allowed for build-up of a dominant fast particle population. Under such appropriate conditions we achieved highly reproducible, long-lived, macroscopically stable FRCs with record lifetimes [4]. This demonstrated many beneficial effects of large orbit particles and their performance impact on FRCs Together these achievements point to the prospect of beam-driven FRCs as a path toward fusion reactors. This presentation will review and expand on key results and present context for their interpretation. \\[4pt] [1] L.C. Steinhauer, Phys. Plasmas \textbf{18}, 070501 (2011).\\[0pt] [2] M.W. Binderbauer, \textit{et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{105}, 045003 (2010).\\[0pt] [3] M. Tuszewski \textit{et al}., Phys. Rev. Lett.\textbf{ 108}, 255008 (2012).\\[0pt] [4] H.Y. Guo, \textit{et al.}, submitted to Nature Communications (2014).
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DPP14/Session/VI2.1