Formation studies of field-reversed configurations on the HFRC-F device

Formation studies of field-reversed configurations on the HFRC-F device Yue Peng¹, Bo Rao¹*, Yong Yang¹, Ming Zhang¹, Zhijiang Wang¹ and Yuan Pan¹ ¹ International Joint Research Laboratory of Magnetic Confinement Fusion and Plasma Physics, State Key Laboratory of Advanced Electromagnetic Engineering and Technology, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China *E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Collisional-merging is a way to form high-performance field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasma. To improve the properties of merged plasma, one feasible way is to optimize the formation process. An experimental device named HFRC-F has been constructed in Huazhong University of Science and Technology, which is used to investigate the field reversed theta-pinch (FRTP) formation process of FRCs. Initial HFRC-F experiments obtain typical parameters with plasma density of 4 × 10²⁰ m⁻³ and lifetime of 75 μs with Bbias = -0.015 T, BPI = 0.015 T and Bmain = 0.035 T. The results also show that, 1) the larger the main magnetic field, the higher the density. 2) the VPI should be appropriate to obtain a larger frozen magnetic flux.