I am currently working on my PhD at York under the supervision of Dr Ben Dudson and Dr Michele Romanelli (CCFE). Achieving fusion requires heating plasma (ionised gas) to temperatures of around 100 million Kelvin, and confining this heat sufficiently well that a self-sustaining reaction can take place. Transport barriers are observed to spontaneously form in the core and edge of tokamak reactors, and act to suppress turbulence in those regions, greatly improving the overall fusion performance. The physics underlying the formation of these barriers is complex and remains poorly understood, involving nonlinear turbulence interactions with flows and profiles. In this project I will couple CENTORI, a two fluid nonlinear core plasma transport/MHD/turbulence code, to BOUT++ an edge simulation code developed at York. I will then undertake a series of simulations of JET and MAST plasmas with the aim of obtaining a self-consistent description of the formation of internal and edge transport barriers.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4492-7858