After working for twenty years as an Electrical Design Engineer, I decided I would like to do something useful. A year on the MSC course in Fusion Energy here at York has led to a PHD in Fusion Energy at Liverpool. During my MSC, I worked for three months down in Culham on Divertor Chemistry with Kevin Verhaegh and I will be returning to Culham shortly to continue investigations of Divertor Chemistry for my PHD.
We obtain spectroscopic Balmer and Fulcher line data from the divertor. However, we need a model of the processes informed by chemistry to be able to meaningfully plot this data. Bayesian mathematics backed up my Monte Carlo techniques can be used to provide this chemical model.
This PHD project aims to use the Balmer and Fulcher line data provided by experiments at Culham to develop a better chemical model. When a better chemical model has been developed, the code, SOLPS, used to predict physical processes within the Scrape Off Layer of the tokamak which is linked magnetically and thermally to the divertor will be updated.