Pegasus Toroidal Experiment

Pegasus Toroidal Experiment

Device type	Spherical tokamak
Location	Madison, Wisconsin, US
Affiliation	University of Wisconsin–Madison
Technical specifications
Major radius	45 cm (18 in)
Minor radius	40 cm (16 in)
Links
Website	Pegasus Toroidal Experiment webpage

The Pegasus Toroidal Experiment is a plasma confinement experiment relevant to fusion power production, run by the Department of Engineering Physics of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. It is a spherical tokamak, a very low-aspect-ratio version of the tokamak configuration, i.e. the minor radius of the torus is comparable to the major radius.

Local Helicity Injection

Pegasus is used to study start up of spherical tokamaks using local helicity injection.^[1][2]

URANIA

Pegasus is being upgraded in 2019 (e.g. by removal of the central solenoid) to build the Unified Reduced Non-Inductive Assessment (URANIA) experiment. This will study plasma startup using transient coaxial helicity injection (CHI).^[2][1]

The max toroidal field is being increased from 0.15 T to 0.6 T, and the pulse duration from 25 to 100 ms.^[3]

References

1. Advancing Local Helicity Injection for Non-Solenoidal Tokamak Startup Bongard 2018
2. "URANIA: A Dedicated Spherical Tokamak Experiment for Developing Non-Solenoidal Plasma Startup Techniques" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-05-04. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
3. "Research Directions on the Pegasus Toroidal Experiment Reusch 2018" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-05-04. Retrieved 2019-05-04.