News & events
Neutral beam powers into the record books | 09/07/2012
On Tuesday 26 June, record neutral beam powers of 25MW were injected into four JET plasmas - exceeding the previous best of 24 MW injected back in 2009. This led to happy faces all round in the Control Room from both the physicists and the neutral beam operations team.
The experiments being undertaken on plasma instabilities – so-called 'edge localised modes' (ELMs) – required consistently high heating power. CCFE staff, who operate JET on behalf of researchers from around Europe, pulled out all the stops on the recently-upgraded neutral beam system. This enabled high quality data to be acquired on how edge plasma instabilities impacted on the plasma-facing surfaces, and particularly on the temperature of the plasma strike points in the divertor region near the bottom of the fusion chamber. JET's Session Leader on the day, Dominico Frigione, was delighted with the results.
Reliable plasma operation helped the neutral beam team push to these record powers, with 14 out of a possible 16 PINIs (neutral beam power sources) available. Relatively high plasma density operation and permission to push to higher beam voltages (110 kV compared to the usual 100kV) coupled with vital conditioning of the injectors led to these impressive results, to the delight of CCFE's Neutral Beam Operations Manager, Ian Day: “The achievement is the result of the hard work and dedication of the neutral beam and power supply teams over the past two years to realise the potential of the EP2 Neutral Beam upgrade," he said.
