After a decade-long program involving more than 700 people and 40 companies, the first of 10 Toroidal Field Coils (TFC) to be procured by Fusion for Energy, ITER’s European Domestic Agency, is ready for shipment to Cadarache, France.
As part of his EUROfusion Engineering Grant, our team member José Lorenzo attended the Final Magnets System project (WPMAG) meeting 2019 held at ENEA in Frascati (National Agency for New Technologies, Italy) from 11th to 13th February. During three days, the participants coming from several research units in Europe (KIT, ENEA, CEA, SPC…) could present their progress on topics related to the DEMO magnet system.
Our group member José Lorenzo has been awarded with a prestigious EUROfusion Engineering Grant (EEG) for his project Structural Analyses of DEMO Magnets. The grant has started on January 1st 2020 and will last three years.
This is the second time that our research group wins this grant. Formerly Albert Gutiérrez was awarded an EGG for the project entitled Software Engineering: Development of High Performance Computing capability for fusion workflows, integrated to the ITER Modelling framework.
The third coil in a series of High-Temperature Superconducting (HTS) coils known as ‘little big coils’ (LBC) has enabled the highest direct-current magnetic field to date at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab), United States. This last coil which barely weighs 400 grams generated a field of 14.4 T while able to retain the superconducting state in a background field of 31.1 T created by a resistive magnet, thus reaching the highest field ever registered of 45.5 T.
High Temperature Superconductor (HTS) current leads are a key technology of the ITER magnet system, transmitting the huge currents (up to 68 kA) from the power supplies at room temperature to the low temperature superconducting coils installed in the fusion reactor. ITER’s large coils will need 60 current leads located at the end of the magnet feeders, thus operating in a lower magnetic field and reducing the heat load compared to conventional current leads. In fact, the higher cost of HTS current leads is by far compensated by the savings in the operation of the cryoplant.
As customary in previous years, last week the 10th Edition of the PUMPS Summer School (Programming and Tuning Massively Parallel Systems) was held at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC). The course is organized by Barcelona Supercomputing Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UPC, and HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Our team member José Lorenzo had the opportunity to attend the course.