Position: PhD Student

Supervisor: Dr Erwin Verwichte (CFSA), Dr Simon Pinches (UKAEA Culham)

Project Title: Instability Driven Fast Ion Transport in Fusion Plasmas

Funding: EPSRC with CASE award (UKAEA)

Brief description of project:

The success of developing magnetically confined fusion as a future energy source relies upon the satisfactory confinement of the energetic fusion products (alpha particles) for sufficiently long that the fuel ions are heated by them to a level where they start to fuse and a self-sustained burn process is achieved. Even in today’s neutral beam heated experiments, such as MAST and JET, anomalies in the classically expected behaviour are observed when various fast ion driven instabilities are observed. The project will address these discrepancies through the development of a more holistic self-consistent description. This will be achieved through the use and development of the sophisticated fast ion code HAGIS, capable of self-consistently modelling the nonlinear wave-particle evolution of the system and global transport simulations conducted with codes such as TRANSP. Bridging the disparate time scales between the physics of wave-particle interactions and the classical transport processes will ultimately allow the effects of fast ion instabilities to be incorporated into global transport simulations as well as the development of synthetic diagnostics for direct comparison with experimental data. This should allow the resolution of differences between experimental observations and classical predictions, as well as allowing more complete predictions for future devices such as ITER and DEMO.

Contact Details

Office:

D3/2.33
Culham Centre for Fusion Energy
Culham Science Centre
Abingdon
OX14 3DB

E-mail:

r.lake@warwick.ac.uk