The Indian steady state superconducting tokamak

SST1 is a Steady State Superconducting Tokamak designed and developed at IPR. The machine has recently been commissioned and the first plasma was produced in June 2013. This was possible after an exhaustive exercise of engineering validation of its various subsystem. The plasma current (around 70 kAmps), the discharge duration (1/2 a second) and other plasma parameters were successively improved upon in various subsequent campaigns of the system. The installation of plasma facing components (PFC) was thereafter successfully achieved in the mid of 2015. The PFC introduces a host of impurities making it difficult to achieve proper conditions for achieving a good plasma discharge. However, these difficulties have been overcome and in the recent campaign repeatable discharges with plasma current in excess of 70 kAmps with a ramp rate of MAmps/sec have been achieved. The plasma temperature has also been found to be high (of the order of 300 to 400 eV), the density at the core is about 10¹³/cc. The saw tooth signature has also been clearly observed in the X-ray signals. The machine is thus ready to carry out interesting physics experiments. (author)