"SPECIAL PLASMA SEMINAR: Applying large-scale computing to predict and optimize the H-mode state in tokamaks"

 

ABSTRACT:  

 

A little over thirty years ago, it was discovered that magnetically confined plasmas could abruptly self-organize to a configuration where the loss of particles and energy across the confinement boundary is significantly reduced.  This high-confinement regime or H-mode enables the design of smaller and less expensive fusion reactors and has become the standard mode of operation of modern tokamak and stellarator experiments.  Predicting and optimizing both the abrupt transition and final self-organized state of H-mode requires multi-scale physics, and diagnostics and computational power have recently reached the levels needed to perform and benchmark first-principle calculations.  This talk will discuss recent advances in applying large-scale computing methods to H-mode tokamak physics in order to quantify the non-linear, multi-scale mechanisms that determine the particle, energy and momentum transport rates through the tokamak boundary.  These calculations represent an important step toward a fully predictive model for the confinement boundary of the tokamak that is necessary for optimizing fusion reactor designs.

 

Dr. Devon Battaglia is an Associate Research Physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, currently stationed at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego, CA. His current research areas in fusion energy physics include the L-H transition, x-ray and magnetic field diagnostics, fast feedback control of magnetically confined plasmas, and high-performance plasma transport simulations. Dr. Battaglia earned his doctorate in 2009 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  His thesis work developed the technology and physics for a novel tokamak startup technique using plasma guns.

---