I’m a second year PhD student being supervised by Professor Kieran Gibson. My project focuses on the issue of controlling the flow of heat and particles to plasma facing materials in magnetically confined fusion devices. In tokamaks, this control is achieved by diverting plasma that escapes from the hot core to the plasma edge along open field lines into a region where the plasma can be cooled before interacting with material surfaces. This region, known as the “divertor”, is a major topic of international fusion research. The York Linear Plasma Device at the York Plasma Institute can routinely produce steady state, magnetically confined plasmas with parameters relevant to the edge and divertor regions of tokamaks. My work aims to investigate a range of issues that impact the understanding of divertor physics. This includes characterizing the plasma turbulence, and considering how this turbulence is affected by plasma-neutral interactions. Electrical probe and spectroscopic measurements will be compared with a range of numerical models, notably the BOUT++ code (led by University of York staff), to improve these models thereby allowing a better tool for future reactor design.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4324-3438