EPS thesis prize for plasma control in fusion

11 April 2012
Showing how to spot and control growing turbulence in the plasma of a fusion reactor or tokamak won engineer Bart Hennen the 2012 thesis prize of the European Physical Society's Plasma Physics Division. During his PhD, Hennen developed a system capable of reliably shooting down so-called magnetic instabilities in tokamaks. Bart Hennen did his PhD work at both Eindhoven University of Technology and at DIFFER and performed his experiments at the German tokamak TEXTOR. His results pave the way to true control of the burning plasma in future power producing fusion reactors like ITER.

Bart Hennen tested his plasma control system at the German tokamak TEXTOR at Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ)

Download the winning thesis - Feedback control of magnetic island suppression in tokamaks

Read more about the control system - Dutch control system for magnetic islands improves fusion reactor performance