Alcator C-Mod Weekly Highlights Jul 26, 2004 FY 2004 weeks of operation planned: 18 weeks, completed: 18.9 weeks. We are currently up-to-air with the primary goal of installing the lower hybrid launcher. In addition, a large number of invessel activities are ongoing in support of ICRF and diagnostic systems. Maintenance and upgrades to diagnostic and power systems are also in progress. Operations/In-vessel --------------------- Re-installation of the inner wall limiter tile modules after cleaning has commenced. Three of six rows of modules have been installed, excluding five modules whose installation was deferred to allow access to diagnostics. The balance of the required Mo tile locking tabs were delivered, and work continues assembling inner wall modules with the new tabs. All twenty EF1 conic heat shields and fifteen of twenty ceiling modules have been installed; the remaining ceiling modules await completion of tiles presently under manufacture in our machine shop. The Active MHD Spectroscopy antennas were re-installed; all boron nitride tiles have been removed from the antennas. Work is continuing on converting the engineering PLC control interfaces to the new software. Contractors have completed the piping of the river water system upgrade for the MIT alternator, and will begin insulating the pipes this week. Maintenance on the power converter, cable trays and surrounding cabinets continues. Lube oil filtration is still in progress Physics ------- C-Mod researchers submitted abstracts for a total of 19 poster and 9 oral contributed papers to the 46th Annual Division of Plasma Physics Meeting. Six invited papers reporting on C-Mod results will also be presented at the meeting in November. Diagnostics ----------- The new CO2 laser for the two-color interferomenter (TCI) upgrade arrived in-house. New buffer amplifier boards were received from the vendor; one example has been wired, installed, and tested satisfactorily. The in-vessel spatial calibration of the three optical systems used for CXRS measurements during the last campaign was completed. The prototype PC board for the new Thomson Scattering integrator circuits is in layout. The rack for the new MHD spectroscopy amplifiers arrived and has been installed in the cell. The power supply rack was also reworked in preparation for the new low voltage power supply installation and the re-installation of the second high voltage power supply and test loads. ICRF Systems ------------- The new J-port flange was received and inspected. Additional work was determined to be required and the flange was shipped to the vendor. The helicoflex gaskets will be delivered August 6. Once the flange and the gaskets arrive, the J-port antenna will be re-installed. Lower Hybrid ------------- A refurbished vacuum oven has been purchased and is being installed at the PSFC. This oven will be used for fast turnaround braze prototyping, and is sized to accommodate the couplers. After electrical and water utility connections are complete, the oven will be tested in the coming week and then should be ready for braze tests. A rebuilt klystron has been installed in the experimental cell, and conditioning has been started. Rui Vieira visited one of our ceramic metallization vendors, to discuss details of procedures, quality assurance and plans for processing alumina which will be used to make additional windows for the PSFC couplers. Inspections of the gasket between the forward and rear waveguides are nearly complete. Of the 48 rear waveguides, 47 have previously been successfully tested to full power (~100 kW) for 0.5 seconds. Arcing in the 48'th has been traced to a small defect with the gasket in waveguide 23C. The forward and rear guides will be separated early in the coming week, so that this can be resolved. Travel and Visitors ------------------- Cynthia Phillips travelled to MIT on July 12 -14 to work with Paul Bonoli and John Wright on TORIC modeling of HHFW heating and current drive experiments in NSTX. They successfully tested a new version of TORIC (TORIC4) using data from recent HHFW experiments on NSTX.This version of TORIC employs a "quasi-local" approximation for the ICRF wave equation that provides a more accurate model for the HHFW regime than previous versions. It also has been parallelized to provide higher resolution simulations than was possible on serial processor machines. Procedures for utilizng EFIT equilibria and experimental density and temperature profiles in the NSTX simulations were developed and successfully implemented. These simulations were carried out on the MARSHALL Beowulf cluster at MIT. TORIC4 will soon be installed on the Petrel Cluster at PPPL as part of the C-Mod - NSTX collaboration activities. This "beta" version of TORIC will hopefully be available for use in TRANSP in the near future. Ron Bravenec (U. Tx) was at MIT last week, working on the BES system and on the calibration of the CXRS diagnostic. A C-Mod quarterly review was held by videoconference with DoE OFES on Tuesday, July 20. Presentations were made by Earl Marmar, Steve Wukitch, Ron Parker and Bob Granetz, covering recent progress, status of FY04 JOULE milestones and Program Execution Agreement tasks, and near-term plans. The viewgraphs from the presentations can be found at http://www.psfc.mit.edu/cmod/sciprogram/quarterly_1040720.pdf. Attending at OFES were Rostom Dagazian and T.V. George. _______________________________________________ Cmod_weekly mailing list Cmod_weekly@lists.psfc.mit.edu http://lists.psfc.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/cmod_weekly