The COMPASS tokamak (COMPact ASSembly) is the main experimental facility of the Tokamak Department. It has been designed and operated in 90th in UKAEA Culham in Great Britain and mothballed in 2002 due to start of the MAST tokamak operation.
The COMPASS tokamak with its size (major radius 0.6 m and height of the vessel approx. 0.7 m) ranks to smaller tokamaks capable of the H-mode operation, which represents a reference operation ("standard scenario") for the ITER tokamak. Importantly, due to its size and shape the COMPASS plasmas correspond to one tenth (in the linear scale) of the ITER plasmas. Due to its direct relevance to the ITER project - the facility was offered by the European Commission and UKAEA to the Institute of Plasma Physics in Prague in autumn 2004. Installation and operation of tokamak COMPASS in the Institute of Plasma Physics sets the Czech Republic among advanced countries in research efforts in high-temperature plasmas and thermonuclear fusion. At present, besides COMPASS there are only two operational tokamaks in Europe with ITER-like configuration capable of regime with the High plasma confinement. It is the Joint European Torus JET and the German tokamak ASDEX-U (Institut fur Plasmaphysik, Garching, Germany). JET is presently the biggest experimental device of this type in the world.
Physics research programme
|