I read this article earlier about how some MIT students started OpenWetWare to make it easier to log their progress and grease the collaboration process and thought, 'why aren't I doing this?', so here's an attempt at opening up my progress on getting nuclear fusion working as an energy source.
There are large groups all over the world working on this problem who I hope to have the opportunity to work with one day, but currently I collaborate with the DIII-D disruption mitigation group based in La Jolla, CA at General Atomics (GA) through a PhD program at the Center for Energy Research (CER) at the University of California in San Diego's (UCSD) Jacobs School of Engineering where I study plasma physics and alternative ways to generate energy. The disruption mitigation group is a branch of the ITER physics group, which is one of many physics research groups within the DIII-D program. DIII-D (doublet 3 [after 1 & 2] - single D shape [as opposed to the prior double]) is one of many tokamaks around the world, a device used to trap plasmas hotter than the sun which would melt a conventional type container.
My particular niche within the disruptions group is development of diagnostics to study runaway electron generation, which occurs in lightning storms in nature but also occurs in tokamaks during startup and disruptions. Our group is specifically interested in preventing their generation or mitigating their effects during disruptions.
I have presented my planned approach to doing this at the 2007 annual meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Plasma Physics in Orlando where I received insightful feedback and contributions from distant members of the plasma physics community, and at numerous internal meetings and seminars at GA and UCSD. Hopefully this blog will bring me more frequent, thorough, and diverse feedback from the worldwide community, but if nothing else at least it should help me gather my thoughts.
Just last Friday we had our first live test of the now re-purposed Lithium Pellet Injector (LPI... we really like acronyms in this business don't we?) which I use for injecting small carbon pellets into runaway electron beams. We successfully fired one of six attempted pellets into the machine, two of which had failed triggers and the other three of which probably suffered from misalignment of the injector.
The amplifiers on my scintillators suffered from undervoltage during these shots due to overdrawn voltage regulators, which we traded for instability and ringing due to power supply fluctuation after removing the regulators. I guess I'll need some filtering capacitors to set that business straight.
That's it for tonight, but look for more adventures (is that even the right word?) to come!
My particular niche within the disruptions group is development of diagnostics to study runaway electron generation, which occurs in lightning storms in nature but also occurs in tokamaks during startup and disruptions. Our group is specifically interested in preventing their generation or mitigating their effects during disruptions.
I have presented my planned approach to doing this at the 2007 annual meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Plasma Physics in Orlando where I received insightful feedback and contributions from distant members of the plasma physics community, and at numerous internal meetings and seminars at GA and UCSD. Hopefully this blog will bring me more frequent, thorough, and diverse feedback from the worldwide community, but if nothing else at least it should help me gather my thoughts.
Just last Friday we had our first live test of the now re-purposed Lithium Pellet Injector (LPI... we really like acronyms in this business don't we?) which I use for injecting small carbon pellets into runaway electron beams. We successfully fired one of six attempted pellets into the machine, two of which had failed triggers and the other three of which probably suffered from misalignment of the injector.
The amplifiers on my scintillators suffered from undervoltage during these shots due to overdrawn voltage regulators, which we traded for instability and ringing due to power supply fluctuation after removing the regulators. I guess I'll need some filtering capacitors to set that business straight.
That's it for tonight, but look for more adventures (is that even the right word?) to come!
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