Progress and Plans of C-2W Advanced Beam-Driven Field-Reversed Configuration Experiments

TAE Technologies, Inc. (TAE) is pursuing an alternative approach to magnetic confinement fusion, which relies on field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasmas composed of mostly energetic and well-confined particles. The high-energy particle population is produced by a state-of-the-art tunable energy neutral-beam (NB) injector system. TAE’s current experimental device, C-2W (a.k.a. Norman) [1], is the world’s largest compact-toroid device. It has made significant progress in FRC performance, producing record breaking, high temperature (T_e >500 eV, T_tot >5 keV) advanced beam-driven FRC plasmas, dominated by injected fast particles and sustained in steady-state for up to 30 ms (limited only by the energy storage on-site). An active plasma control system has been developed and utilized in C-2W to produce better and consistent FRC performance using magnets, electrodes, gas injection, and tunable NBs. Overall FRC performance is well correlated with NBs and edge-biasing system, where higher total plasma energy is obtained by increasing both NB injection power and applied-voltage on biasing electrodes. This paper will review the highlights of recent C-2W experimental campaigns as well as future plans.

[1] H. Gota et al., Nucl. Fusion 61, 106039 (2021).