I graduated with an MPhys from the University of York in 2017, and am now completing a PhD in plasma science and fusion energy, as a Fusion CDT student. My project is entitled Investigation of the Power Balance in Advanced Divertor Configurations on MAST-Upgrade, and is supervised by Professor Kieran Gibson (University of York) and Dr Andrew Thornton (Culham Centre for Fusion Energy)
The divertor is the regulator valve and exhaust of the tokamak. The high energy particles escaping the confinement of the tokamak are diverted and impact upon a plate, to prevent them from damaging the vessel wall. This puts a high heat load on the divertor plates, which approaches the limits of available materials in the larger tokamaks of today. Future tokamaks are predicted to be much bigger, so the divertor heat load must be reduced.
The Super-X divertor is predicted to greatly reduce the heat load on the divertor plates, by increasing the seperation distance between the bulk plasma and the plates. I will investigate it’s effectiveness with experiments on the MAST-Upgrade tokamak. These results will be compared with theory and simulation, and with experimental results from other divertor configurations.