Supervisors:
Stefan Kragh Nielsen (skni@fysik.dtu.dk) and Thomas Jensen (thoje@fysik.dtu.dk)
Description:
Tokamaks are used to confine plasmas which are used in fusion research. A large tokamak can sustain fusion plasmas which are more than 20 times hotter than the core temperature of the sun. The largest tokamak in the world (the Joint European Torus) has demonstrated production of fusion power and the coming international ITER tokamak, in France, will demonstrate that fusion can be produced in a sustainable way (where fusion power exceeds the heating power).
The key component of a tokamak is the strong magnetic fields which are generated by external coils and a plasma current. On DTU we are presently installing the first Danish University Tokamak which is expected to confine plasmas with temperatures in the order of 3 million degrees Celsius. The success of this device strongly depends on the structure of the magnetic field lines. In this project we will measure the field strength at various location, which will be used for validation of numerical calculations. Finally, a code to predict the electron and ion orbits in the magnetic field will be developed. Here we will investigate which types of particle orbits can be confined in the tokamak and which particles will be lost. This will indicate which kind of plasma heating will be most beneficial for the DTU tokamak.
