Having completed an MSci degree in Physics at Imperial College, I am now undertaking a PhD project based at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), partnered with the University of York. My research looks at the scaling of particle and energy confinement in tokamaks with different fuel isotopes, using various computational models of plasma transport. It is supervised by Dr. David Dickinson (York) and Dr. Francis Casson (CCFE).
While tokamaks to date have used mainly deuterium plasmas, ITER and future reactors will operate using a mix of deuterium and tritium. In preparation for these devices, a strong understanding of the relation between different fuel isotopes and how they affect plasma transport processes must be established, as current theory predicts the opposite trend of that observed experimentally.
For this project, different computational models will be used to investigate this relation, from non-linear gyrokinetic codes to simpler gyrofluid codes, validating their predictions with data from JET. This includes JET’s upcoming deuterium-tritium campaign, which will take place over the course of this PhD. These improved models can then be used in integrated plasma simulators for future works.