The Australian Plasma Fusion Research Facility: Recent Results and Upgrade Plans

Full text: The Australian Plasma Fusion Research Facility will be upgraded to support the development of world-class diagnostic systems for application to international facilities in preparation for ITER. The upgrade will include a materials Diagnostic Test Facility, new diagnostics, heating and vacuum systems, and deliver access to new magnetic configurations relevant to development of edge and divertor plasma diagnostics for next generation devices. New results from some of the optical imaging and magnetic diagnostics underpinning the upgrade plans will be presented, including a innovative technique to synchronously image MHD mode structure using fast optical emission imaging. Initial results provide high resolution radial and poloidal mode structure information in qualitative agreement with a simple cylindrical Alfven eigenmode model. Results of a new multi-view system will be presented, and compared with CAS3D modelling. A new toroidal Mirnov array will supplement the present two 20 channel poloidal arrays, and will provide valuable additional information to our data mining analysis. Our techniques, now applied to several large stellarators and to JT-60U, have been extended to provide automated mode classification of new data, based on maximum likelihood estimates from previously clustered and identified data. Investigation in the influence of magnetic islands on plasma showed several interesting effects, including a local enhancement of confinement under some conditions. Mapping and probe results will be presented. (author)