The latest picture from the MAST-Upgrade project shows the UK fusion machine's largest magnetic coil being carefully positioned into the vacuum vessel.
This is the second of four poloidal field coils that will help confine the fusion fuel in a magnetic ‘cage' within the MAST-Upgrade device during experiments. The coils will keep the intensely hot fuel – in the form of a plasma – away from the walls of the steel vessel, and will provide the spherical plasma shape that physicists want to study in the device.
Now that the coil is safely installed, its magnetic centre will be aligned to the vessel axis to sub-millimetre accuracy.
“Aligning these coils is not easy, but since we put the first coil in we've refined the process and tweaked the tooling to speed things up,” comments Joe Milnes, MAST-Upgrade Project Leader. “This will help us meet our target of getting all four coils in the vessel early in the New Year – a significant build milestone on the way to the completion of the main vessel module.”
Source: CCFE
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