A New Breakthrough Brings Us Closer to a Safe Artificial Sun
A New Breakthrough Brings Us Closer to a Safe Artificial Sun
  • Reporter Park Geun-woo
  • 승인 2017.05.03 17:12
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The very core of a nuclear fusion device is tokamak, which cells super-high temperature state plasma with strong magnetic field. Plasma encapsulated in tokamak creates high internal pressure and temperature, which destabilizes the surface state. When it destabilizes, a considerable amount of plasma particles and heat are shot out at once, and is called 'plasma surface explosion.' This, depending on its size, can inflict fatal damage to the interior of tokamak. Recently, a breaking research published in Nature’s Scientific Reports states that the unstable state inside tokamak has been attracting a lot of attention in the industry.
Prof. Yoon Gun-su’s team (PHYS), cooperated with Prof. Park Hyeon-kyu’s team (PHYS) from UNIST and National Fusion Reaction Institute (NFRI)’s Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) Center. They discovered an isolated perturbation that takes place right before the plasma surface explosion inside the tokamak. The process of generation of such perturbation was also investigated. This was notable to academia as it suggested a new analysis that plasma surface explosion is caused by isolated perturbation, revealing the limits of the established eigen mode based interpretation. The breakthrough brings new hope in understanding the mechanism of plasma surface explosion, which has been one of the conundrums of nuclear fusion related research. The research team is currently analyzing the intense electromagnetic wave that accompanies the surface explosion.