As part of the Internet Plasma Physics Education eXperience (IPPEX) project, this Java applet is designed to illustrate the basic principles of magnetically confined fusion.
Anxious to get started? Just move the 3 slider bars, press the START button and see what Score you get. If you can get a score of 50 or more, you're doing very well. The highest score achieved so far is around 157. One user was able to reach 168 by entering a third digit in one of the slider fields. By going even further, some have reached 170. The original intention was to allow only two digits in these fields, so the bug which permitted three digits to enter the calculation may eventually be squashed.
NEW!! You can now
type in the values of the three parameters.
Click in the text area of the slider to begin. Use the
"Enter" key to set the value. Then, click the "START" button.
The internal parameters of the Virtual Tokamak have been tweaked
relative to the classic
version to prevent experienced users from using this new feature
to easily achieve very high scores. Consequently, the two versions of
the applet will give different scores if the same slider values are used.
If you're the patient type, you can read the help page first. And for those of you who know the basics of our Virtual Tokamak and would like to play physicist for awhile, try these exercises.
NOTE: This applet is Java 1.1 compliant and will not work on a PC with an older browser or on most Macintosh computers. If you are having difficulty running the applet, try the original version of the Virtual Tokamak. Adventurous Mac users can instead try using MRJ 2.1 (Macintosh Runtime for Java) with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.5. Please report any other problems to Daren Stotler.
Daren Stotler's Home Page
IPPEX Home Page