Particle control and plasma performance in the Lithium Tokamak eXperiment
- Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton, New Jersey 08543 (United States)
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831 (United States)
- University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095 (United States)
The Lithium Tokamak eXperiment is a small, low aspect ratio tokamak [Majeski et al., Nucl. Fusion 49, 055014 (2009)], which is fitted with a stainless steel-clad copper liner, conformal to the last closed flux surface. The liner can be heated to 350 °C. Several gas fueling systems, including supersonic gas injection and molecular cluster injection, have been studied and produce fueling efficiencies up to 35%. Discharges are strongly affected by wall conditioning. Discharges without lithium wall coatings are limited to plasma currents of order 10 kA, and discharge durations of order 5 ms. With solid lithium coatings discharge currents exceed 70 kA, and discharge durations exceed 30 ms. Heating the lithium wall coating, however, results in a prompt degradation of the discharge, at the melting point of lithium. These results suggest that the simplest approach to implementing liquid lithium walls in a tokamak—thin, evaporated, liquefied coatings of lithium—does not produce an adequately clean surface.
- OSTI ID:
- 22228075
- Journal Information:
- Physics of Plasmas, Vol. 20, Issue 5; Other Information: (c) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1070-664X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Fueling Studies on the Lithium Tokamak Experiment
H-mode fueling optimization with the supersonic deuterium jet in NSTX