Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) have possibly found the cause of heat's abrupt and perplexing fall before disturbances that might harm doughnut-shaped tokamak fusion plants.
Dealing with the source might help future fusion facilities overcome one of their biggest obstacles and move the fusion energy generation that powers the sun and stars on Earth closer to reality.
Researchers published their paper, "The 3D magnetic topology and plasma dynamics in open stochastic magnetic field lines," in Physics of Plasma.
Fusion Energy Becomes 'Spaghetti' to Destro Tokamaks
The powerful magnetic fields that contain the hot, charged plasma gas that powers the reactions were found to be 3D disordered, which caused the collapse, according to researchers.
"We proposed a novel way to understand the [disordered] field lines, which was usually ignored or poorly modeled in the previous studies," said (Newswise) lead author Min-Gu Yoo, a post-doctoral researcher at PPPL.
In fusion facilities, powerful magnetic fields take the role of the intense gravity that keeps fusion processes in place in celestial bodies.
However, when the plasma becomes unstable in laboratory trials, the field lines allow the extremely high plasma heat to escape containment quickly.
A picture shows the fully-assembled 10-meter-large poloidal field coil number 6 (PF6), assembled by China, in the winding facility for the construction of poloidal field coils, which will be part of the magnetic system that will contribute to confine and model plasma during the launch of the assembly stage of nuclear fusion machine "Tokamak" of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Saint-Paul-les-Durance, southeastern France, on July 28, 2020. - Thirty-five nations are collaborating in the ITER energy project aimed at mastering energy production from hydrogen fusion, as in the heart of the sun, a potential new source of carbon-free and non-polluting energy.
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When liberated from confinement, this one million degrees of heat can impact and harm the walls of fusion facilities by crushing plasma particles together to release fusion energy.
"In the major disruption case, field lines become totally [disordered] like spaghetti and connect fast to the wall with very different lengths," said principal research physicist Weixing Wang, Yoo's PPPL advisor and a co-author of the paper.
Because of that, the plasma heat energy is now directed towards the wall.
Fusion is the joining of light elements into plasma, a hot, charged state of matter made up of free electrons and atomic nuclei that produces enormous quantities of energy.
Ninety-nine percent of the observable cosmos is made of plasma composed of ions and free electrons.
About Tokamak
Newsweek said a tokamak, a donut-shaped machine that utilizes strong magnets to regulate a circular flow of extremely hot plasma in which fusion can occur, is one of the most important reactor types in the field of fusion.
It is critical to locate these hills in the magnetic-field lines to prevent these plasma disruptions, which are necessary for having fusion energy available to the grid. By doing so, we can increase the duration of fusion processes and prevent them from occurring.
To develop a clean, carbon-free, and essentially limitless source of energy to generate electricity, scientists worldwide are working to harness and regulate the fusion process on Earth.
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