NE doctoral student Promise Adebayo-Ige took second overall in the judging of the Early PhD technical talks at the recent National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science (GEM) conference in Houston. The work he presented was on calculating the heat flux that is incident upon plasma facing components (PFCs).
Adebayo-Ige also won the GEM Fellowship in February, which came with a virtual internship (due to the COVID-19 pandemic) at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, which houses the NSTX-U fusion reactor. His project for the summer was to write a new heat flux analysis code that will be used in future Infrared Thermography experiments at NSTX-U.
Studying the spatial width and temporal evolution of peak flux is important for lowering the heat flux and understanding when disruptions occur. Interactions with the hot plasma will cause damage to PFCs and damage can be severe if the plasma becomes unstable.
“The conditions of the fusion reactor are very extreme,” said Adebayo-Ige. “The plasma temperatures are on the order of around 10 keV, which is hotter than the sun’s core.”
Overall, this type of work is integral for machine protection and to assess performance and lifetime of PFCs.