Alcator C-Mod Weekly Highlights
             October 9th, 2007
				

FY2008 weeks of research operations:
     Target: TBD
     Completed: 0 weeks


Operations
----------

Routine maintenance continued last week on the alternator breakers, and
water and oil cooling systems.


In-vessel Work
--------------

All work on the three new flux loops has been completed.  The loop
connections have been verified from in-vessel to the data acquisition
racks.  This work was one of the three major goals of this up-to-air
period that also includes improvements to the MSE diagnostic and the
lower hybrid launcher.

New lens holder components are being fabricated for the MSE in-vessel
optical canister.  We expect the new lens holders to reduce changes in
polarization caused by thermally induced stresses in the optics.  Tests
of the optical components outside the vessel are being conducted.

Work continues on polarimeter shutter refurbishment, new bolometer box
cabling installations, and a re-entrant flange for a new camera to
monitor impurity production from the GH limiter.  Installation of the
new gas feed tubes for the lower hybrid limiter box has been completed.


Lower Hybrid System
-------------------

All of the jungle gym components have been inspected and cleaned.  Nine
of the twelve sub-assemblies have been reassembled.  We continue to
inspect the rear waveguide transformers.

Tests needed to confirm proper compression of the rf gaskets that join
the launcher forward waveguide to the rear waveguide continued.


ICRF Systems
------------

We continued to inspect and clean stub tuner and phase-shifter
components.  The FMIT#1 cooling water pump is being refurbished.  Work
last week also included calibration of the FMIT#3 and #4 instrumentation
and its associated PLC and CAMAC data acquisition systems.


Travel and Visits
-----------------

Jerry Hughes, Amanda Hubbard and John Rice attended meetings of the
Pedestal, CBDM, and Transport Physics groups of the ITPA, in Naka,
Japan, October 1-3.  Jerry and Amanda primarily attended the Pedestal
meeting, where Amanda presented updates on joint experiments with JET
(PEP-7) and with NSTX and MAST (PEP-16), and Jerry presented preliminary
C-Mod results on pedestals in varied magnetic configurations.  Amanda
also presented, on behalf of Joe Snipes, recent results on low density
limits for L-H transitions (CDB-10), in the CDBM Threshold working
group.  John primarily participated in the Transport Physics group,
presenting inter-machine scalings of intrinsic rotation and chairing a
rotation working group session. John also presented recent spatially
resolved x-ray spectroscopic measurements from C-Mod on behalf of Alex
Ince-Cushman, a C-Mod graduate student.

Dave Terry has returned to Palo Alto, CA, to participate with the vendor
in the inspection of the #117 klystron.

Stewart Zweben, PPPL, was at C-Mod last week to discuss the analysis of
the X-point GPI data and to help with the in-vessel calibration and
hardware.

Dave Johnson, PPPL, visited last Friday and gave the PSFC seminar on
"Status and Plans for ITER Diagnostics".  He also had discussions with
Earl Marmar, Steve Wolfe, Jim Terry, Joe Snipes, Jim Irby, and Steve
Scott on diagnostic work being done on C-Mod and its applications to
ITER.

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