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Magnetic Confinement Fusion: BCTX Section

Principal Investigator: Morse

Overview
The UCBNE department is home of the Berkeley Compact Toroidal Experiment (BCTX). Operated by Professor Ed Morse, the BCTX is a spheromak experiment with the unique capability of producing auxiliary-heated spheromaks. The machine has a lower hybrid drive system which can deliver up to 20 MW of RF power at 432 MHz to the plasma for a 100 us pulse length.		 fusionlogo.gif

Given complete coupling of RF energy into the plasma, this represents
sufficient energy to heat the plasma electrons to 1 keV. Experiments
at such temperatures offer the opportunity to explore ideal MHD
pressure limits and energy confinement regimes not accessible in
other devices.

Installed diagnostics on this machine include Thomson scattering
for electron temperature, magnetic field B-dot loops, a laser interferometer
for density measurement, several spectrometers for impurity ion
spectroscopy, and an ion Doppler temperature measurement system.
Current experiments are focused on determining electron heat confinement
in spheromaks using the RF heating source as a heat pulse. To date,
electron temperatures up to 150 eV have been measured in BCTX.