Plasma modeling of MFTF-B and the sensitivity to vacuum conditions

The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF-B) is a large tandem mirror device currently under construction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The completed facility will consist of a large variety of components. Specifically, the vacuum vessel that houses the magnetic coils is basically a cylindrical vessel 60 m long and 11 m in diameter. The magnetics system consists of some 28 superconducting coils, each of which is located within the main vacuum vessel. Twenty of these coils are relatively simple solenoidal coils, but the remaining eight are of a more complicated design to provide an octupole component to certain regions of the magnetic field. The vacuum system is composed of a rough vacuum chain, used to evacuate the vessel from atmospheric pressure, and a high vacuum system, used to maintain good vacuum conditions during a plasma shot. High vacuum pumping is accomplished primarily by cryogenic panels cooled to 4.50K. The MFTF-B coil set is shown together with typical axial profiles of magnetic field (a), electrostatic potential (b), and plasma density (c). The plasma is divided into nine regions axially, as labelled on the coil set in Figure 1. The central cell, which is completely azimuthally symmetric, contains a large volume plasma that is confined by a combination of the magnetic fields and the electrostatic potentials in the yin-yang cell