Bulletin of the American Physical Society
63rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics
Volume 66, Number 13
Monday–Friday, November 8–12, 2021; Pittsburgh, PA
Session PT02: Tutorial: Progress Toward Fusion Energy Breakeven and Gain as Measured Against the Lawson CriterionInvited Live
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Chair: Uri Shumlak, University of Washington Room: Ballroom C |
Wednesday, November 10, 2021 2:00PM - 3:00PM |
PT02.00001: Progress toward Fusion Energy Breakeven and Gain as Measured against the Lawson Criterion Invited Speaker: Samuel Wurzel Starting from Lawson’s original 1955 report [1], this tutorial provides a review and re-derivation of the Lawson criterion, which is a key concept in the pursuit of fusion breakeven and gain that relates the fuel density n, confinement time τ, and fuel temperature T to the energy gain Q of a fusion plasma. Extensions to Lawson’s original work use different definitions of τ, e.g., energy confinement time τE, in magnetic versus inertial fusion, as will be explained in the tutorial. More than 75 values of the Lawson parameter nτ and T achieved by historical and contemporary fusion experiments, spanning magnetic (MCF), inertial (ICF), and magneto-inertial fusion (MIF), are extracted from the published literature [2]. Unique combinations of nτ and T map directly to unique values of Q; the tutorial will define and describe three versions of energy gain used by the fusion community: fuel gain Qfuel (relative to energy/power absorbed by the fuel), scientific gain Qsci (relative to energy/power applied at the vacuum boundary), and engineering gain Qeng (relative to recirculating electricity). The relationship between Qsci and Qfuel depends on the efficiency of absorption of the externally applied energy by the fusion fuel. The tutorial will further describe methodologies for extracting nτ and T from the published literature that are necessarily specific to different fusion approaches, and will discuss major differences in applying the Lawson criterion to MCF versus ICF. Finally, the more-challenging physics requirements for advanced fuels, e.g., D-D, D-3He, and p-11B, compared to D-T fusion will be presented. |
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