Session GP1 - Poster Session IV.
POSTER session, Tuesday afternoon, October 30
Exhibit Hall B,
Formation of self-organized spheromak plasmas requires, at a minimum, that the input power exceed the loss power in order to increase magnetic field strength. Other factors, such as injector geometry or low-order MHD modes, are also thought to affect the formation process. In SSPX we measure both the input power at the coaxial source, and the loss power to the flux conserver (radiation and plasma conduction) to obtain the global power balance which we can relate to the field buildup. The radiation loss is determined by wide field-of-view bolometers, both time-integrated and time-resolved. Radiation losses are dominated by low-Z impurities and are typically less than 20energy input for clean discharges. We use edge magnetic probe measurements as input to the CORSICA code to determine the total stored magnetic energy and ohmic heating power, which then allows us to compute the energy confinement time from density and temperature profiles obtained by Thomson scattering. This work was performed under the auspices of US DOE by the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract No. W-7405-ENG-48.