I completed an integrated Master’s at the University of Nottingham but due to my interest in Nuclear Fusion I arranged and completed an external Master’s project working with Culham. The project involved analysing visible camera images from MAST using Python to see what data can be extracted from these images about the plasma.
My PhD is based in Liverpool under Mohammed Hasan and it involves developing a novel time-stepping algorithm to improve the simulations of heating a plasma of negative ions in the neutral beam injector before it is neutralised. Neutral beam injection is one of the main methods of heating plasma in a tokamak. A simulation method which has proven to be very effective is called PIC (Particle in cell) using Discrete Event Simulation (DES) instead of conventional time integration which is a very fast method of doing this but at the moment this applies for collisionless simulations. The aim of this project will be to extend this performance to simulations which include particle collisions. This will be done by building proof of concept PIC-MCC (with Monte Carlo collisions) codes which will also utilise DES. The result of this will be to aid the design of more efficient neutral beam injectors considering that ELISE (the one designed for ITER) operates at 28% efficiency