With the guests that Chancellor Angela Merkel conducted the experiment in which hydrogen plasma was produced for the first time on Wednesday in the reactor. By pressing a button from Merkel turned a 2 mega watt mikrovågspuls a small amount of hydrogen gas to hydrogen plasma. Previous attempts at the end of last year have been carried out with helium.
The plasma is held suspended in a magnetic container to avoid contact with the plasma chamber walls. According to the investigator Hans-Stephan Bosch corresponded attempt expectations. The temperature reached 80 million degrees and plasma existed in a quarter of a second.
Similar tests will now be carried out to the middle of March when the chamber is opened and provided with insulation panels. Then, the temperature can be raised and lives in ten seconds, is expected.
If the four years it is estimated to hold the plasma alive for up to 30 minutes at the maximum heat output of 20 megawatts.
The goal of the experiments is to test this type of fusion reactor, stellarator, in relation to the second type, the tokamak, which uses two different methods to keep the magnetic plasma suspended. The most familiar is the ITER tokamak to be built in Cadarache.
But the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, IPP, conducting experiments with stellaratorreaktorn Wendelstein 7-X, also has a tokamakreaktor in Garching. With comparative experiments will now test the stellar tractor main advantage – the possibility of continuous operation. Tokamak can only be run in pulses without additional auxiliary equipment.
Wendelstein 7-X has cost 370 million euros and has received support from the German research funding as EU funds. Equipment for the reactor has been ordered for around 70 million euros and suppliers come from companies across Europe, but also from American specialists in Princeton, Oak Ridge and Los Alamos.
No comments:
Post a Comment