Having completed a Master’s thesis at Imperial College London on automatic detection and tracking of tokamak impurities, I am currently on a fusion PhD programme led by the fusion CDT and the University of York. The PhD is ‘Modelling of Advanced Divertor Power Exhaust’, and is supervised by Dr. Ben Dudson and Professor Bruce Lipschultz at the University of York, and Dr. David Moulton at CCFE.
The edge interactions between a fusion plasma and the surrounding tokamak components are crucial to the success of an operating tokamak. In particular, edge effects such as the liberation of impurities can lead to detrimental losses of power and efficiency. In an attempt to mitigate these effects, many different divertor configurations have been suggested, including the new Super-X divertor at MAST-U. My current project will centre around modelling transport and power loads for these different divertor configurations, and comparing the predictions made to experimental results.