Egemen Kolemen, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, has been featured in an article in Popular Mechanics on plasma spurts inside tokamaks — the doughnut-shaped devices that can contain nuclear fusion reactions.
The article, written by Kat Friedrich, reports that:
"Seeking stability for fusion reactions, an international team of physics researchers has developed a sophisticated combination of magnetic controls to reduce these plasma spurts that can damage tokamaks. They published their work earlier this year in the journal Physics of Plasmas."
Kolemen and his collaborators have tried some new techniques for controlling the heat of the reaction inside the tokamaks, including:
"... Using a controller that perturbs the plasma. “We’ve been looking at using the 3D coils,” he says. “We have these … structures. They’re like windows around the reactor on the torus. They make electric and magnetic fields that are not symmetric with respect to the cross-section of the plasma. What you do with this 3D perturbation is that you can change the stability of the edge. You can make the edge-localized modes go away. That’s great.”