EDFA Transport Topical Group Meeting 7-10 Sept

[jamesr]

I will be going to the EDFA Transport Topical Group Meeting in Cordoba, Spain next week where I should here a lot of up to date talks on ITER progress. Or in other words how they hope their simulations will help them control it and stop it destroying itself 😉
My own 3D nonlinear two-fluid simulation code isn’t quite ready so unfortunately I won’t have anything to present yet :long:

The full abstracts don’t seem to be posted but there is at least the titles & contributors here

I was thinking I might wear my Focus Fusion t-shirt to see if I get any comments…

[Brian H]

jamesr wrote: I will be going to the EDFA Transport Topical Group Meeting in Cordoba, Spain next week where I should here [hear] a lot of up to date talks on ITER progress. Or in other words how they hope their simulations will help them control it and stop it destroying itself 😉
My own 3D nonlinear two-fluid simulation code isn’t quite ready so unfortunately I won’t have anything to present yet :long:

The full abstracts don’t seem to be posted but there is at least the titles & contributors here

I was thinking I might wear my Focus Fusion t-shirt to see if I get any comments…

Brave man! Take along some application forms, and tell them you’ll put in a good word for them when ITER implodes and FoFus rule the world. :cheese:

[DerekShannon]

Wear it! Or just be very open in communicating the latest with the rest of the scientific community, and the willingness of the focus fusion team to collaborate and inclusively expand. Focus fusion would greatly benefit from more visiting scientists or graduate students working on the project, and even visits to the lab or phone/email consultations could provide invaluable insight into ongoing challenges.

Let’s imagine another lab might have a new kind of neutron detector and the FoFu-1 experiment would be a perfect venue to compare its performance relative to our current silver activation and bubble instruments. Or a group working on advanced materials for the Iter walls could do some testing with FoFu-1 just by exposing their material within the vacuum chamber during a few shots.

Get a talk on focus fusion scheduled as part of their university’s plasma physics seminar series; get them interested in looking at FoFu-1 data; or even get them eager to establish their own dense plasma focus lab just to try and prove focus fusion infeasible–Failing to falsify is sorta like proving! ;-D And the goal is to soon have a result from FoFu-1 that many labs will be want to replicate. Science will decide.

Oh, and have an awesome and educational time at the conference and in beautiful Cordoba!

[Rezwan]

Well put, Derek!

Perhaps you can turn this into a post for the website along the lines of “Towards More Cross Collaboration in Fusion” or something to that effect.

[jamesr]

Just got back – lots of good talks and posters, as well as usual complement of monotone ones just putting up slide after slide of graphs with no insight into their meaning or implications.

General mood seemed positive for the rate of progress, but still lots of unanswered questions about the understanding of all the phenomena affecting heat and particle transport in tokamaks & stellarators.

Diagnositcs have improved over the last few years on all the various devices round the world like AUG, DIII-D, TEXTOR, TORE SUPRA etc. However there are a lot of phenomena that are seen on some devices and not others. In particular some of the scaling laws do not fit JET (the largest current tokamak) which suggests the understanding of the behaviour once scaled upto ITER’s size is very much in doubt.

Also the role of diffusion coefficients to model the various classical, and turbulent transport mechanisms is becoming more problematic at the plasma edge as the transport here seems to be dominated by blobs of plasma shearing off then being accelerated away towards the wall. If this mechanism is not understood and controlled, too much of the plasma will deposit energy on the proposed beryllium wall of ITER, rather than being safely channeled down to the divertor region at the bottom.

If anyone is interested in any more details on I can try and remember who said what.

Hopefully they’ll post a copy of the group photo taken at the end of the week – I picked that day to wear my FF t-shirt!

[Brian H]

james;
about those blobs: my intuition has long been that at the “meso scale” (smaller than stars, bigger than plasmoids) the chaotic behavior of plasmas will always defeat attempts to constrain it. Or at the very least make them uneconomic. How say you?

[DerekShannon]

Thanks, James! I think we’d love to get your report as an official post. To be fair, I want to put forward some comments from a Caltech plasma physics prof who kindly met with me on Tuesday. They could both be part of the series “Better Science Through Opposing Viewpoints”.

[Brian H]

james;
‘Grats on wearing the T-shirt! Any reactions? Did you hand out application forms? :cheese:

[jamesr]

I’m sorry to say I didn’t really have much chance to talk about FF with any of the key people. There was only limited time in coffee breaks etc to network, and naturally my first priority had to be my own research. I needed to introduce myself, the code I writing, and try and find potential collaborators as far as what kind of simulations I should run through it once it is more complete (with my supervisor standing next to me half the time).

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