Ultra-high-speed camera captures plasma jet dynamics for fusion research

Physicists at Imperial College London are using an ultra-high-speed framing camera to study how plasma jets interact with target materials, in research intended to help validate advanced fusion-energy simulations.

Researchers in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London are studying how dense plasma jets interact with magnetised and unmagnetised targets, part of a wider effort to understand the physics behind fusion energy production.

The camera used in the work was purchased through the AMPLIFI Partnership, a UK consortium bringing together academia and industry, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and First Light Fusion. The Partnership is working to address the scientific challenges involved in inertial fusion energy production, with the longer-term aim of establishing a safe, secure and stable source of baseload power for the UK.

“Our research is focused on solving key scientific challenges of fusion energy. The Partnership is exploring the physics underlying First Light’s ‘Amplifier’ technology that could enable us to produce the extreme conditions required for fusion energy production on much smaller, cost-effective drivers than typically suggested. For this challenging application, the SIMD32 is the only framing camera capable of taking enough images at the speed and resolution we need,” said Simon Bland, Professor of Plasma Physics at Imperial College.

“For these experiments the SIMD32 was set up to record at 33 million frames per second to ‘freeze’ the behaviour of fast-moving plasma jets produced by the MAGPIE (Mega-Ampere Generator for Plasma Implosion Experiments) at Imperial College. The multiple frames of the SIMD32 enable us to explore both the production of shock waves as the jet reaches a target, and its dynamics later in time including the growth of any instabilities in the plasma. This information is then used to help validate some of the world’s most advanced magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations, enabling the Partnership to better model the behaviour of complex fusion targets,” he added.

The SIMD32 is a double-shot, multichannel ultra-high-speed camera that captures up to 32 images at speeds of up to one billion frames per second, without shading or parallax. Its precise timing system and intensified charge-coupled device (CCD) sensors give close control over interframe time, gain and exposure, allowing it to capture extremely fast phenomena. Triggering adjustments and output signals are managed through dedicated software, which also provides measurement and image-enhancement functions.

Find out more about the Plasma Physics Research Group at Imperial College London: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/plasma-physics/

Find out more about the AMPLIFI Partnership: https://www.amplifi-partnership.org.uk/

Find out more about the SIMD32: https://specialised-imaging.com/products/framing-cameras/simd/

Specialised Imaging can be contacted on +44-1442-827728 / +1-951-296-6406 / +49-8141-666-8950 or at [email protected]