Long-time measurements of line-integrated plasma electron density using a two-color homodyne optical fiber interferometer.

A two-color homodyne Mach-Zehnder (M-Z) optical fiber interferometer with wavelengths of 1.55 and 1.31 µm was developed for long-time measurement of line-integrated plasma electron density. A novel phase difference demodulation algorithm based on a single 3 × 3 optical coupler was implemented in a two-color optical fiber interferometer scheme for the first time. Our laboratory tests showed that this new optical fiber interferometer could determine the phase shift due to the low-frequency ambient vibration and could maintain high phase resolution measurement. The resolution of the new interferometer was less than 0.04 rad in 1000 s, corresponding to a line-averaged electron density of less than 1.0 × 1019 m-2. Actual plasma discharge experiments performed on KTX-CTI, which is a new compact torus injector (CTI) constructed at the Keda Torus eXperiment (KTX), showed that this interferometer has excellent several-second stability.

Optical fiber interferometer application for high electron density measurements on compact torus plasmas.

An optical fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer at a wavelength of 1.55 µm has been developed for measurements of high electron density on compact torus (CT) plasmas with a high time resolution of 0.1 µs and high phase resolution of 6.4 × 10-4 rad. To improve density measurement accuracy, the phase noise of the interferometer has been investigated in detail and optimized. In the bench test, the interferometer was calibrated using a piezoelectric ceramic actuator with known stroke. Initial results on CT plasma show that the optical fiber interferometer provides reliable density measurements at two spatial locations and the bulk velocity of plasma can be determined by the method of time of flight.

A parametric method for correcting polluted plasma current signal and its application on Keda Torus eXperiment.

We have developed a parametric method for eliminating the background component of the plasma current, which is measured by a Rogowski coil and polluted by the toroidal magnetic field in the vacuum vessel of the Keda Torus eXperiment (KTX) reversed field pinch (RFP) device. The method considers the toroidal magnetic field windings, the KTX vacuum chamber, and the Rogowski coil as a linear time-invariant system; in this case, a constant frequency response function characterizes the system. Using this response function, the current component caused by pollution from the toroidal magnetic field can be predicted exactly for an arbitrary input current to the toroidal magnetic field windings. Compared with the traditional proportional compensation method, the proposed method has great flexibility and universality and it is potentially applicable to cases in which the toroidal field current signal changes over time with plasma feedback signals. Furthermore, the method can be applied to other similarly affected signals, such as magnetic field signals. As an example, we have corrected the poloidal and toroidal magnetic field signals better to reveal the true physical processes for the RFP state.