Confinement and heating studies of field-reversed configurations

Confinement studies of field-reversed configurations (FRCs) have been actively pursued during the past ten years with the larger and longer-lived FRCs produced in the FRX-C and FRX-C/LSM devices. Confinement measurements have included the global FRC quantities and, in some cases, profiles of electron temperature and density. The inferred confinement times and transport coefficients are used for comparison with transport models as wells as to find the best operating conditions in the experiment. Global power flow modelling shows that energy confinement during the equilibrium phase is usually dominated by particle losses, with a substantial secondary contribution from electron thermal conduction. Particle losses in present kinetic FRCs are strongly influenced by open field line confinement, which complicates the study of transport mechanisms. The electron thermal conduction is observed to be anomalous, as in other plasma devices. The bulk electrical resistivity is also anomalous and shows no evidence of classical Spitzer scaling. Recently, the resistive anomaly has been shown to correlate with tilt-like magnetic perturbations observed with Mirnov coils. FRC confinement studies have also been extended to a higher temperature regime during magnetic compression heating. In these experiments, translated FRCs are compressed by increasing the external magnetic flux up to a factor of seven on a time scale between the radial Alfven time and the FRC lifetime. Electron and ion temperatures up to 0.4 keV and 1.6 keV, respectively have been obtained. Confinement times scale roughly as r2 during compression