Two PhD students rewarded for their posters
© 2014 EPFL
Zhouji Huang and Himank Anand, two PhD students of the CRPP, were rewarded for the quality of their posters at the recent conference of the Plasma Division of the European Physical Society. The former received the Itoh Project Prize and the best poster prize was awarded to the latter.
The Itoh Project Award, presented by Mrs. Prof. Sanae Itoh, University of Kyushu, Japan, is to reward outstanding work dealing with turbulence phenomena in plasmas. The winner of this edition, Zhouji Huang, presented the results he obtained in dedicated experiments, carried out with a diagnostic able to quantify the localized density fluctuations in the plasma. He has then shown that the amplitude of these fluctuations increases at the periphery of the plasma and depends on the shape of it, in particular on its triangularity. He also showed that the theoretical models, applied to the present experimental conditions, predict the same dependence of fluctuations on the plasma shape. These excellent results confirm the mechanism responsible for these fluctuations and validate the theoretical models.
It is for his work on the plasma control system in tokamaks that Himank Anand received one of four prizes awarded to the best posters of the conference. For his thesis project, he developed a new system for controlling the shape of the plasma, which has the advantage of decoupling the control of the plasma position from the control of its shape. The new system is based on the real time reconstruction of the position of the plasma surface, for detecting small flux differences between some reference points in the plasma. He also showed, using simulations, how to incorporate the control of the plasma position in this new control system.