Rijnhuizen says farewell to TEXTOR

14 July 2009
On Friday, July 10th, the permanent Rijnhuizen delegation said goodbye to their colleagues at the Jülich TEXTOR-tokamak. Researchers from Rijnhuizen did experiments at Jülich since the late '80s.

During the first ten years this occurred in a number of independent diagnostic projects. From 1999 onwards the high temperature plasma physics program of Rijnhuizen was fully carried out on TEXTOR in the framework of the Trilateral Euregio Cluster - TEC. Now, 10 years later, the 'TEXTOR-group" has largely returned to Rijnhuizen, although a number of experiments is still running.

Roger Jaspers, Tony Donné and Egbert Westerhof gave an overview of the scientific results of the Dutch group during the farewell party. The theme of their presentation was the historical soccer match between the Netherlands and Germany - according to Jaspers, Donné and Westerhof, the score is currently 2-1 for the Dutch. Their hosts were explicitly invited for a return game, by stationing a team of scientists on Magnum-PSI. As a reminder of the collaboration, prof. Ulrich Samm presented Tony Donné with an allegedly "indestructible" proctection tile from the TEXTOR burn chamber - which the Dutch group managed to destroy anyway with their high-power ECRH beam.

The successful cooperation between the two institutes will continue in the future as the new TEC takes shape. This will focus on plasma-wall interaction studies with the linear plasma machines Magnum-PSI at Rijnhuizen and JULE-PSI in Jülich, addressing the vital role that the interaction between wall materials and plasma in the fusion machine will have in optimizing future fusion reactors. TEC will thus stay at the leading edge of fusion research.

Prof. Ulrich Samm presents Tony Donné with a proctection tile from the TEXTOR burn chamber