#nstx

[weareupallnighttogetsherloki]

Selfie with the #NSTX-U #PPPL #plasmafusion

[zackapsenexp]

Sorry I didn't make a post last week, but unfortunately I was unable to go to the lab due to inclement weather (long drives in heavy snow are not a good idea). Regardless of my absence, I was able to work on a new assignment from home because of the secure VPN connection I mentioned in my last post.

This new assignment was to approach making a smooth cross section of φ in a different manner. My mentor suggested using a program called Triangle, which preforms very accurate Delaunay Triangulations. This essentially turns a polygon into a grouping of triangles of all roughly the same size.  The mesh structure of the data I am reading in per cross section of the NSTX is in concentric non-circular rings. Each ring has a different amount of points, and each point has a φ value for each time step. For creating the structure I can simply create a 2D ring by turning to adjacent rings into a ring-like polygon. Then I run Triangle over this file. I can repeat this for all adjacent rings, and then compile all the triangulation into one file that contains thousands of triangles. If done for each of the 60 rings inside each of the 32 planes, I can descibe the geometry of the entire data set. And then I can append φ data corresponding to the points based on any requested plane and time step to create a clean rendering of the plane with a heat map like coloration (pseudocolor plot) for φ. This worked well but needs a little work for next week.