This year I had the chance to go abroad with funding from FuseNet, my destination: Garching/Munich. For my graduation project I did research on the validation and implementation of a real-time sawtooth detector for the nuclear fusion experiments ASDEX Upgrade. While working on this project I lived for five months in Munich.

Implementation

The implementation of the sawtooth detector is done using the sawtooth detector made by van den Brand et al. of which I made multiple improved versions during my thesis. During my work I found multiple real-time use cases (applications) for this detector, found a set of requirements for each use case and a set of representative discharges to validate the performance on. By looking at multiple discharges I did improve the performance of the detector significantly and made it suitable for running in real-time on ASDEX Upgrade (with a reaction time of only 1 ms). These improvements consisted of tweaking the detector but also changing it in such a way that it uses partial reconnection instead of full reconnection models for detection of the sawtooth crashes. Overall I look back on a very successful time working at IPP, and I am happy that the detector was able to perform so well.

Snowboarding and Surfing

Next to research work, Munich has a lot of other stuff to offer. I like the city and could tell/write a lot about the size of the beer/the Bavarian traditions, the nice people and more. But I will stick to the surfing and the snowboarding. During wintertime I went to the Alps almost every week. I went snowboarding a lot, and I also went for the first times tourskiing (climbing the mountain with ski’s and then skiing down). One of these tourskiing-trips my dad came along. Although my dad was able to keep up with my phase of walking uphill, I’ve heard from a reliable source (my mom) that afterwards he was complaining for over a week because of muscle strain. Back to Munich: another cool thing about Munich is that in the middle of the city the river has natural waves, on which you can actually surf! So when spring announced itself I bought my own surfboard and went there a lot. Already after a couple of painful falls I started to get the hang of it, as can be seen in the picture. To everybody staying in Munich I can recommend checking out the Eisbach wave.

- Kornee Kleijwegt