- Electric Tokamak
The
UCLA Electric Tokamak is a low field (0.25 T) magnetic fusion device with a large aspect ratio. Four sets of independent coils are necessary for OH (ohmic heating ) current drive, vertical equilibrium field, plasma elongation and plasma shaping (D or reverse-D). The OH system provides 10 V·s using a 10 kA power supply. Up to 0.1 T of vertical field can be applied for horizontal control and this is more than sufficient for all plasma configurations, including high beta. An additional set of coils provide a small horizontal field to correct for error field and to stabilize the plasma vertically. All the coils are located outside the vessel and are constructed out ofaluminium . A Rogowski probe outside the vessel and sets of Hall probes inside the vessel are used to monitor plasma current, position and shaping and are used in the control feedback loop. The poloidal system was designed using an in-house equilibrium code as well as a variety of other codes in order to cross-check computations and to assess the stability of the resulting plasma. Like mosttokamak s the machine uses a combination of RF heating and neutral beam injection to drive and shape the plasma. The machine has a major radius of 5 metres, a minor radius of 1 metre, plasma current of 45 kiloamperes and can produce a coreelectron plasmatemperature of 300electronvolt s. First plasma was achieved in January1999 .Financial status
The Electric Tokamak currently has run out of funding, and its principal investigator and designer, Robert Taylor, a UCLA professor, has retired. Factors leading to loss of funding are attributed to include its lack of extensive plasma diagnostics, its large size (it was the largest tokamak in the world), and its place in the politics of fusion. When it was operating, The Electric Tokamak was funded mostly by the
Department of Energy (DOE). It currently stands dormant in the Science and Technology Research Building (STRB) on the UCLA campus.External links
* [http://www.et.ucla.edu/et_index.htm UCLA Electric Tokamak Homepage]
* [http://et.ucla.edu/ UCLA Tokamak Research]
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