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Scientific and technical challenges on the road towards fusion electricity
No full textThe goal of the European Fusion Roadmap is to deliver fusion electricity to the grid early in the second half of this century. It breaks the quest for fusion energy into eight missions, and for each of them it describes a research and development programme to address all the open technical gaps in physics and technology and estimates the required resources. It points out the needs to intensify industrial involvement and to seek all opportunities for collaboration outside Europe. The roadmap covers three periods: the short term, which runs parallel to the European Research Framework Programme Horizon 2020, the medium term and the long term. ITER is the key facility of the roadmap as it is expected to achieve most of the important milestones on the path to fusion power. Thus, the vast majority of present resources are dedicated to ITER and its accompanying experiments. The medium term is focussed on taking ITER into operation and bringing it to full power, as well as on preparing the construction of a demonstration power plant DEMO, which will for the first time demonstrate fusion electricity to the grid around the middle of this century. Building and operating DEMO is the subject of the last roadmap phase: the long term. Clearly, the Fusion Roadmap is tightly connected to the ITER schedule. Three key milestones are the first operation of ITER, the start of the DT operation in ITER and reaching the full performance at which the thermal fusion power is 10 times the power put in to the plasma. The Engineering Design Activity of DEMO needs to start a few years after the first ITER plasma, while the start of the construction phase will be a few years after ITER reaches full performance. In this way ITER can give viable input to the design and development of DEMO. Because the neutron fluence in DEMO will be much higher than in ITER, it is important to develop and validate materials that can handle these very high neutron loads. For the testing of the materials, a dedicated 14 MeV neutron source is needed. This DEMO Oriented Neutron Source (DONES) is therefore an important facility to support the fusion roadmap
Conceptual design and proof-of-principle testing of the real-time multispectral imaging system MANTIS
No full textThe Multispectral Advanced Narrowband Tokamak Imaging System (MANTIS) is proposed to resolve the steep temperature and density gradients in the scrape-off layer of tokamaks in real-time. The initial design is to deliver two-dimensional distributions of key plasma parameters of the TCV tokamak to a real-time control system in order to enable novel control strategies, while providing new insights into power exhaust physics in the full offline analysis. This paper presents the conceptual system design, the mechanical and optical design of a prototype that was built to assess the optical performance, and the results of the first proof-of-principle tests of the prototype. These demonstrate a central resolving power of 50-46 line pairs per millimeter (CTF 50 ) in the first four channels. For the additional channels, the sharpness is a factor two worse for the odd channels (likely affected by sub-optimal alignment), while the even channels continue the trend observed for the first four channels of 3% degradation per channel. This is explained by the self-cancellation of off-axis aberrations, which is an attractive property of the chosen optical design. The results show that at least a 10-channel real-time multispectral imaging system is feasible
Effect of high flux plasma exposure on the micro-structural and -mechanical properties of ITER specification tungsten
No full textWe have performed a combined study using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), nuclear reaction analysis (NRA) and nano-indentation (NI) techniques to reveal the impact of high flux plasma exposure on the properties of a sub-surface region of the commercially available pure tungsten fabricated following the ITER specification. TEM examination revealed the formation of a dense dislocation network and dislocation tangles, resulting in a strong increase in the dislocation density by at least one order of magnitude as compared to the bulk density. The plasma-induced dislocation microstructure vanishes within a depth of about 10–15 μm from the top of the exposed surface. Surface hardness after the plasma exposure was characterized by NI and was found to increase significantly in the sub-surface region of 1.5–3 μm. That was attributed to the resistance of the plasma-induced dislocation networks and deuterium-induced defects, whose presence within a depth of ∼1 μm was unambiguously detected by the NRA measurements as well.</p
Field-Line Localized Destabilization of Ballooning Modes in Three-Dimensional Tokamaks
No full textField-line localized ballooning modes have been observed at the edge of high confinement mode plasmas in ASDEX Upgrade with rotating 3D perturbations induced by an externally applied n = 2 error field and during a moderate level of edge localized mode mitigation. The observed ballooning modes are localized to the field lines which experience one of the two zero crossings of the radial flux surface displacement during one rotation period. The localization of the ballooning modes agrees very well with the localization of the largest growth rates from infinite-n ideal ballooning stability calculations using a realistic 3D ideal magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium. This analysis predicts a lower stability with respect to the axisymmetric case. The primary mechanism for the local lower stability is the 3D distortion of the local magnetic shea
Tractable flux-driven temperature, density, and rotation profile evolution with the quasilinear gyrokinetic transport model QuaLiKiz
No full textQuasilinear turbulent transport models are a successful tool for prediction of core tokamak plasma profiles in many regimes. Their success hinges on the reproduction of local nonlinear gyrokinetic fluxes. We focus on significant progress in the quasilinear gyrokinetic transport model QuaLiKiz (Bourdelle et al 2016 Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 58 014036), which employs an approximated solution of the mode structures to significantly speed up computation time compared to full linear gyrokinetic solvers. Optimisation of the dispersion relation solution algorithm within integrated modelling applications leads to flux calculations x10 6-7 faster than local nonlinear simulations. This allows tractable simulation of flux-driven dynamic profile evolution including all transport channels: ion and electron heat, main particles, impurities, and momentum. Furthermore, QuaLiKiz now includes the impact of rotation and temperature anisotropy induced poloidal asymmetry on heavy impurity transport, important for W-transport applications. Application within the JETTO integrated modelling code results in 1 s of JET plasma simulation within 10 h using 10 CPUs. Simultaneous predictions of core density, temperature, and toroidal rotation profiles for both JET hybrid and baseline experiments are presented, covering both ion and electron turbulence scales. The simulations are successfully compared to measured profiles, with agreement mostly in the 5%–25% range according to standard figures of merit. QuaLiKiz is now open source and available at www.qualikiz.com
Aqueous nanoparticle polymer solar cells: Effects of surfactant concentration and processing on device performance
No full textThe effect of side-chain substitution and hot processing on diketopyrrolopyrrole-based polymers for organic solar cells
No full text2-Methoxyethanol as a new solvent for the processing of methyl ammonium lead halide perovskite solar cells
No full textPlasmon-exciton-polariton lasing
No full textMetallic nanostructures provide a toolkit for the generation of coherent light below the diffraction limit. Plasmonic-based lasing relies on the population inversion of emitters (such as organic fluorophores) along with feedback provided by plasmonic resonances. In this regime, known as weak light–matter coupling, the radiative characteristics of the system can be described by the Purcell effect. Strong light–matter coupling between the molecular excitons and electromagnetic field generated by the plasmonic structures leads to the formation of hybrid quasi-particles known as plasmon-exciton-polaritons (PEPs). Due to the bosonic character of these quasi-particles, exciton-polariton condensation can lead to laser-like emission at much lower threshold powers than in conventional photon lasers. Here, we observe PEP lasing through a dark plasmonic mode in an array of metallic nanoparticles with a low threshold in an optically pumped organic system. Interestingly, the threshold power of the lasing is reduced by increasing the degree of light–matter coupling in spite of the degradation of the quantum efficiency of the active material, highlighting the ultrafast dynamic responsible for the lasing, i.e., stimulated scattering. These results demonstrate a unique room-temperature platform for exploring the physics of exciton-polaritons in an open-cavity architecture and pave the road toward the integration of this on-chip lasing device with the current photonics and active metamaterial planar technologies
Defect prevention in silica thin films synthesized using AP-PECVD for flexible electronic encapsulation
Get PDFIndustrially and commercially relevant roll-to-roll atmospheric pressure-plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition was used to synthesize smooth, 80 nm silica-like bilayer thin films comprising a dense ‘barrier layer’ and comparatively porous ‘buffer layer’ onto a flexible polyethylene 2,6 naphthalate substrate. For both layers, tetraethyl orthosilicate was used as the precursor gas, together with a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen and argon. The bilayer films demonstrated exceptionally low effective water vapour transmission rates in the region of 6.1 × 10 −4 g m −2 d −1 (at 40 °C, 90% relative humidity), thus capable of protecting flexible photovoltaics and thin film transistors from degradation caused by oxygen and water. The presence of the buffer layer within the bilayer architecture was mandatory in order to achieve the excellent encapsulation performance. Atomic force microscopy in addition to solvent permeation measurements, confirmed that the buffer layer prevented the formation of performance-limiting defects in the bilayer thin films, which likely occur as a result of excessive plasma–surface interactions during the deposition process. It emerged that the primary function of the buffer layer was therefore to act as a protective coating for the flexible polymer substrate material.</p