Sharing the Need to Know

On Friday April 26, our group leader Mervi Mantsinen joined the fellow ICREA Research Professors and ICREA administrative staff at the ICREA annual meeting, the ICREA calçot-free Calçotada 2019. The event took place in the emblematic premises of the Moritz Brewery in the heart of Barcelona.

ICREA stands for the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies. It is a foundation supported by the Catalan Government and guided by a Board of Trustees. Each year ICREA launches a competitive Senior call to choose researchers through a robust, merit-based process that relies on the opinions of independent, high-profile experts who look for quality and excellence, creativity and talent.

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CONICET scientist performs a stay at our group

Alejandro Soba.

From February to August 2019, the Fusion group is receiving the visit of a scientist from Argentina, Dr. Alejandro Soba of the National Atomic Energy Commission of Argentina (CNEA) and National Scientific and Technical Research Council  (CONICET). The objective of Dr. Soba’s stay is to develop a neutron transport deterministic module for the in-house code ALYA.

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Code Camping at ITER

From the 1st to the 5th of April, our group has participated in the Code Camp of the EUROfusion Code Development for Integrated Modelling” (WPCD) Work Package at ITER Headquarters in St. Paul-lez-Durance (France).

WPCD develops generic and flexible sophisticated workflows for fusion physics applications, aiming at providing a validated modular suite for the simulation of complete plasma discharges of any existing and future tokamaks, including JET, JT-60SA, ITER and DEMO.

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Getting ready for new experimental campaigns at JET

Mervi Mantsinen and Dani Gallart at JET.

The Joint European Torus (JET) is getting ready for a new campaign with deuterium (D) fuel mixture at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), UK. After this D campaign, a tritium (T) campaign is planned to follow. These campaigns are made in preparation for the eventual D-T campaign with a fusion reactor relevant 50%-50% D-T fuel mixture. It will be the second D-T campaign at JET; the first D-T campaign at JET was carried out in 1997. The production and physics of born alphas (He-4) at 3.5MeV due to D-T fusion reactions will be tested and assessed with the ITER-like-wall made of beryllium (Be) and tungsten (W).

As high-performance discharges are sought, the control of high-Z impurity transport will play a key role during this campaign. One of the main goals is to keep the impurity accumulation at the plasma core low. In this regard, large efforts have been carried out by the experimental and modelling team during the preparation of these campaigns.

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EUROfusion planning meeting & visit to Marconi supercomputer

WPCD Annual Planning Meeting attendants at CINECA, Bologna (Italy).

Last week two of our group members, Albert Gutiérrez and Ignacio López de Arbina, attended the Annual Planning Meeting of the EUROfusion Work Package Code Development for Integrated Modelling (WPCD). The event took place at the CINECA headquarters in Bologna, Italy, a computing center that host among others the Marconi supercomputer which devotes a significant part of its computing power to the nuclear fusion community.

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