On 23 November 2016 the new superconducting magnet for Magnum-PSI was ramped up to its maximum field of 2.5 tesla for the first time after its arrival at DIFFER in October 2016. The superconducting magnet can maintain this field indefinitely, and allows the Magnum-PSI team to create and confine plasma discharges for hours on end. This will allow the team to perform unique long duration tests of wall materials under realistic fusion reactor conditions.
To the right: trace of the current in the Magnum-PSI superconducting magnet. At its peak, the magnet generated a 2.5 tesla field along the central axis of Magnum-PSI. In this linear plasma generator, DIFFER researchers explore how a dense plasma and a material wall will interact with each other under the same circumstances as at the wall of future fusion reactors such as ITER.
At the exhaust of the ITER fusion reactor, materials will face particle fluxes of 1023 to 1025 particles per square meter every second. The heat load is 10 MW per square meter, up to 1000 MW per square meter during sudden energy bursts from the fusion plasma. Magnum-PSI is the only laboratory experiment in the world capable of exposing materials to those intense conditions. In previous experiments, Magnum-PSI already tested components from ITER and other fusion experiments.
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