Asia Pacific Physics Week 2023 (APPW2023)

Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023  

2:40 PM - 3:20 PM  Plenary Talk  Boonyarit Chatthong (Prince of Songkla University) 

Overview of TT-1 simulation and experimental study

B. Chatthong,1 S. Sangaroon,2 A. Wisitsorasak,3 N. Poolyarat,4 and P. Klaywittaphat 5

1 Faculty of Science, Prince of Songkla University, Songkhla, Thailand

2 Mahasarakham University, Maha Sarakham, Thailand

3 King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, Bangkok, Thailand

4 Thailand Institute of Nuclear Technology, Bangkok, Thailand

5 Faculty of Engineering, Thaksin University, Phatthalung, Thailand

Thailand Tokamak 1 (TT-1) is Thailand’s first tokamak, a critical step towards developing fusion technology in the country. While the main vacuum chamber and magnet coils were adopted from HT-6M tokamak of ASIPP, China, other systems, i.e. power supply, vacuum, diagnostic and data acquisition systems were newly developed with collaboration between the Chinese ASIPP and TT-1 teams. The TT-1 construction was done at the Thailand Institute of Nuclear Technology, Nakhon Nayok, Thailand. and the first plasma was obtained in April 2023. Since then, more than 400 shots have been recorded with plasma current more than 50 kA. This overview aims to introduce TT-1 to fusion community, including its goal and the Thailand fusion program plan. Recently, some research studies have been done to support TT-1 operations. An integrated predictive simulation code, CRONOS, has been used to investigate its plasma performance in the ohmic, L-mode and H-mode phases using ICRH, ECRH and LH heating schemes. This allows predictions of both ion and electron temperatures which are in the range of several hundred eV and a few keV, respectively. In addition, the study of fast ion physics in hydrogen-based neutral beam heating plasma has also been numerically investigated. Currently, collaborative work on the conceptual design of the Heavy Ion Beam Probe (HIBP) to be installed on TT-1 has been initiated between Thai and Japanese researchers. Furthermore, the initial results of hard X-ray spectroscopy measured with a LaBr3(Ce) detector for runaway electron studies in TT-1 have been discussed. At last, feasibility study of using SMBI for TT-1 has been done. This work is partially supported by PMU-B contract no. B370660019