The Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) has enlisted the help of Ben Shepherd from ASTeC's MaRS group to perform some magnetic material tests. CCFE brought some samples of steel to be tested by Ben in the MaRS group's magnet laboratory at Daresbury. These samples were of a grade of steel that is proposed to be used in the new MAST Upgrade tokamak under construction at Culham, and CCFE were concerned that the magnetic permeability would be too high for the materials to be used near the plasma in the tokamak. However, it was demonstrated using a high-field dipole and accurate magnetic field measurements that the samples being tested were actually much less permeable than expected. This is an important and very positive result for CCFE. Construction of the £30m upgrade to MAST continues.
