Tracer-encapsulated solid pellet injection system

he method of tracer-encapsulated solid pellet (TESPEL) is now flourishing in various fields. The original purpose to study impurity transport without giving substantial perturbation on the plasma is implemented successfully for years. In addition to this, TESPEL is being intensively applied to study thermal (especially non-local) transport, high energy particles with the use of TESPEL ablation cloud, and spectroscopy from the viewpoint of atomic data. It is now further growing up to the utilization of multiple tracer methods which was not planned at the initial phase of the project. The proof-of-principle experiment using triple tracers has been successfully implemented. This opens a way to compare the Z dependence or mass dependence of impurity transport. In this article, as TESPEL is used in a variety of fields, the TESPEL injection system is summarized together with the method of TESPEL production, TESPEL storage disk, TESPEL guide system, and the differential pumping system. Also, the observation system for TESPEL flight and TESPEL ablation is explained

Steady-state data acquisition method for LHD diagnostics

The LHD experiment has gone through 5 campaign periods over the past 4 years, during which the diagnostics data continues to grow and the primary 28 measurements produce about 620 MB/shot in 150 shot/day 3-min cycles. In 2002, 30-min long-pulse experiments will be carried out in LHD, where real-time operations are indispensable for plasma measurements and data acquisition. The new scheme for utilizing conventional CAMAC digitizers in long-pulse experiments has been discussed and examined. As a result, in LHD, CAMACs will shift into 120?180 s cyclic operation, synchronized by the diagnostic timing system. The new CompactPCI-based digitizer frontend has performed about 84 MB/s continuous acquisition in benchmarks, and has been formulated with the conventional CAMAC system to make concurrent acquisitions

Multi-functional Diagnostic Method with Tracer-encapsulated Pellet Injection

In order to obtain a better understanding of impurity transport in magnetically confined plasmas, a Tracer-Encapsulated Soild PELlet (TESPEL) has been developed. The essential points of the TESPEL are as follows: the TESPEL has a double-layered structure, and a tracer impurity, the amount of which can be known precisely, is embedded as an inner core. This structure enables us to deposit the tracer impurity locally inside the plasma. From experiences of developing the TESPEL production technique and its injection experiments, it became clear that various plasma properties can be studied by the TESPEL injection. There are not only impurity transport in the plasma but also transport both outside and inside of the magnetic island O-point, heat transport and high-energy neutral particle flux. Therefore, the TESPEL injection has a favorable multi-functional diagnostic capability. Furthermore a Tracer-Encapsulated Cryogenic PELlet (TECPEL) has been also developed. The TECPEL has an advantage over the TESPEL in terms of no existence of carbons in the outer layer. The TECPEL injector was installed at LHD in December 2005, and the preliminary injection experiments have been carried out

Observation of charge-exchange spectra on C6+ +H in low-energy collision

The extreme ultraviolet spectra of C VI have been studied for a Neutral Beam Injection (NBI) plasmas in Large Helical Device (LHD). A strong distortion in the population distribution over the excited levels was observed and we conclude that is caused by charge-exchange recombining (CXR) processes between C^6+ ion and recycling neutral hydrogen. Spatially resolved measurements show that the C^6+-H CXR processes take place in the plasma peripheral region in LHD. We have taken a CXR pan of C VI 1s-4p line using the result of a calculation code

High Energy Particle Measurements during Long Discharge in LHD

The spatial resolved energy spectra can be observed during a long discharge of NBI plasma bycontinuously scanning the neutral particle analyzer. In these discharges, the plasmas are initiated by the ECH heating, after that NBI#2 (Co-injection) sustains the plasma during 40-60 seconds. The scanned pitch angle is from 44 degrees to 74 degrees. The injected neutral beam (hydrogen) energy of NBI#2 is only 130 keV because the original ion source polarity is negative. The shape of spectra is almost similar from 44 degrees to 53 degrees. However the spectra from 55 degrees are strongly varied. It reflects the injection pitch angle of the beam according to the simulation (53 degrees ot R* = 3.75 m in simulation). The beam keeps the pitch angle at incidence until the beam energy becomes to the energy, which the pitch angle scattering is occurred by the energy loss due to the electron collision. The low flux region can be observed around 10-15 keV, which is 15 times of the electron temperature. The energy region may be equal to the energy at which the pitch angle scattering is occurred. At the energy, the particle is scattered by the collision with the plasma ions and some of particles may run away from the plasma because they have a possibility to enter the loss cone. According to the simulation, the loss cone can be expected at the 10 keV with the small angular dependence. The depth of the loss cone is deep at the small pitch angle. The hollow in the spectrum may be concluded to be the loss cone as the tendency is almost agreed with the experimental result

Human Hematopoietic Stem Cells Can Survive In Vitro for Several Months

We previously reported that long-lasting in vitro hematopoiesis could be achieved using the cells differentiated from primate embryonic stem (ES) cells. Thus, we speculated that hematopoietic stem cells differentiated from ES cells could sustain long-lasting in vitro hematopoiesis. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether human hematopoietic stem cells could similarly sustain long-lasting in vitro hematopoiesis in the same culture system. Although the results varied between experiments, presumably due to differences in the quality of each hematopoietic stem cell sample, long-lasting in vitro hematopoiesis was observed to last up to nine months. Furthermore, an in vivo analysis in which cultured cells were transplanted into immunodeficient mice indicated that even after several months of culture, hematopoietic stem cells were still present in the cultured cells. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report to show that human hematopoietic stem cells can survive in vitro for several months

Spatial resolved high-energy particle diagnostic system using time-of-flight neutral particle analyzer in Large Helical Device

The time-of-flight-type neutral particle analyzer has an ability of horizontal scanning from 40 to 100° of the pitch angle. The information from the spatially resolved energy spectrum gives not only the ion temperature but also the information of the particle confinement and the electric field in plasmas. We have been studying the energy distributions at various magnetic configurations in the neutral beam injection (NBI) plasma. The spatially resolved energy spectra can be observed during long discharges of the NBI plasma by continuous scanning of the neutral particle analyzer. The shape of spectra is almost similar from 44° to 53°. However, the spectra from 55° are strongly varied. They reflect the injection pitch angle of the beam. The pitch angle scanning experiment during the long discharge of NBI plasma has also been made under the reversal of the magnetic field direction. NBI2 becomes counter injected with the reversal. We can easily observe the difference between co- and counter injections of NBI. During the electron cyclotron heating in the low-density plasma for the formation of the internal thermal barrier, large neutral particle increase or decease can be observed. The degree of the increase/decrease depends on the energy and the density. The reason for the variation of the particle flux is that the orbit of the trapped particle changes due to the electric field formed by the strong electron cyclotron heating