Compact Toroidal Hybrid Research Progress and Plans

The Compact Toroidal Hybrid (CTH) is a torsatron/tokamak hybrid. The main goals of the CTH experiment are to study disruptive behavior as a function of the applied 3D magnetic shaping, and to test and advance computational tools able to describe 3D MHD physics such as the V3FIT reconstruction code and NIMROD modeling of CTH. Recent density limit disruption and hard x-ray generation studies will be overviewed and their relevance to tokamaks and quasi-axisymmetric stellarators will be discussed. Ongoing diagnostic development for the experiment includes development of a new bolometer tomography technique, new Hall probe array measurements, new spectroscopic studies of W and Ta, and coherence imaging of plasma flows. CTH also serves as a test bed for diagnostic development for our collaborations on the larger facilities like DIII-D and W7-X.