Fusion energy is often considered the future of clean energy, capable of delivering an abundant supply of energy without carbon emissions. Tokamaks are one of the most favored designs for nuclear fusion reactors due to their compactness, safety, and cost-effectiveness.One of the primary challenges is maintaining the stability of the plasma, especially at the edge near the reactor walls.
The shape of the tokamak is crucial for influencing plasma behavior. Dr. Parisi highlighted that understanding this was a key motivation for their research. The National Spherical Torus Experiment at PPPL, which has a cored apple-like shape, demonstrated favorable properties compared to traditional donut-shaped tokamaks.
However, the plasma temperature experiences a very sudden drop at the edge where it meets the wall. This region is known as the pedestal. “ELMs are big filaments that carry and deposit plasma on the chamber wall. This is bad because the high transient heat fluxes can quickly damage the plasma wall,” explained Dr. Parisi.
In refining the model, the researchers addressed the stability of the pedestal to types of current and pressure-driven instabilities . Further, they used gyrokinetics to study micro-instabilities and turbulence within the pedestal.“Our results suggest that tokamaks should aim to achieve wide pedestals in tokamaks that are free of ELMs,” said Dr. Parisi.
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