Speaker: Livia Casali, UT-Knoxville
Title: "Highly radiating plasmas in negative triangularity and progress towards integrated transport modeling"
Abstract: Highly radiating plasmas in strongly shaped negative triangularity (NT) were achieved at DIII-D with reactor-relevant seeding gases, i.e., neon, argon, and krypton, as extrinsic impurities featuring simultaneously high performance (N >2), divertor heat flux reduction and intrinsically no ELMs. The absence of the requirement to stay in H-mode translates in a higher frad,core potentially allowed in NT shape effectively mitigating the power exhaust issue. We demonstrate that integration of NT configuration with high radiation can lead to confinement improvement and the experimental reduction of the divertor heat flux is well capture by SOLPS-ITER modeling. Core-edge integrated simulations with the new developed SICAS code (SOLPS-ITER Coupled to ASTRA-STRAHL) provides for the first time self-consistent background plasma and impurity transport from the divertor target to the core with good agreements with experimental data. These results support that there is a path to highly radiating, high performance NT plasma with low PSOL.
Bio: Dr. Livia Casali is an Assistant Professor and Zinkle Faculty Fellow at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Previously she worked at General Atomics on the DIII-D tokamak where she was co-leading the core-edge integration area. Her work is focused on boundary physics and core-edge integrated solutions with special emphasis on the role of radiative divertor and impurity behavior to achieve high performance operating scenarios with mitigated heat power. Her research includes both experimental and modeling work at international fusion facilities such as ASDEX Upgrade, MAST-U Tokamak, DIII-D Tokamak etc. More recently she also expanded her work on the integration of fusion neutronics with plasma models. In 2022, she received the Department of Energy Early Career Award and was named ITER Research Scientist Fellow. In 2024 she was selected as international member for the new Baseline ITER Research Plan Committee and she co-organized the first UTK/ORNL Summer School on Plasma Physics and Nuclear Fusion. She is executive committee member of the U.S. Transport Task Force and the U.S. Burning plasma Organization Council. She is a member of the ITPA Div/SOL, and the chair of the Edge Coordinating Committee. She served in the FESAC subcommittee on international benchmarking. She received her PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching working on the ASDEX Upgrade Tokamak for which she received the EPS/PPCF Poster Prize from the European Physical Society and the Pietro Blaserna prize from the Italian Physics Society.
In-person seminars are only available to CU ID holders. At this time, Non-Columbia affiliates and the general public are only invited to participate remotely. Contact [email protected] if you would like the Zoom link for this seminar.