News – Page 30 – Fusion Group

Heating up the engines at JET

October 24, 2017October 25, 2017

The Joint European Torus (JET) chamber (Photo: extremetech)

After almost one year of the JET shutdown, the General Planning Meeting (GPM) was held at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) during the 11th to 13th of October. The meeting was followed on-site by three of our fusion group members, Mervi Mantsinen, Shimpei Futatani and Dani Gallart.

Many aspects of the following JET campaigns were discussed at the GPM. More importantly, all the proposals made by the fusion community were evaluated and a slot was assigned accordingly as a main or back-up experiment or, due to lack of time and prioritization criteria, suppressed, a priori, from the campaign. The selection of the proposals was carried out by the team of Task Force Leaders (TFLs) who presented an ambitious plan for the coming campaigns.

ITER-BSC collaboration wins a prestigious PRACE supercomputing project

October 24, 2017October 25, 2017

The international project JOREK_P, led by our Fusion group member Dr Shimpei Futatani in close collaboration with ITER, has been awarded with computing time amongst the 84 proposals submitted in the 15th Call for PRACE Project Access. PRACE has granted the project 15.0 million core hours on MareNostrum 4 for a period of 12 months (starting October 2017).

Interview of Johannes Schwemmer, Fusion for Energy Director

October 24, 2017

La Vanguardia, a Spanish newspaper, has published an interview with Johannes Schwemmer, Fusion for Energy (F4E) Director. F4E is the agency in charge of managing the ITER project (Reactor International Experimental Thermonuclear) with headquarters in Barcelona, where it employs more than 400 people.

Broad scope of physics at Bienal de Física 2017

August 24, 2017November 21, 2017

The 36^th Bienal de la Real Sociedad Española de Física was held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on the 17th-21st of July. The charming city was a perfect choice to host the Spanish physical community. Its people, gastronomy and old streets are ideal to let your imagination fly after some really interesting talks.

The conference gives an idea of the research carried out in Spain. The scope of research carried out is very broad and many fields were covered, from our research topic Plasma Physics to Nuclear physics, Thermodynamics, Energy and Sustainability, Molecular Physics, Astrophysics etc. Our PhD student Dani Gallart attended the conference and contributed with a paper entitled “Heating modelling and extrapolation of hybrid plasmas at JET”.

Google enters in the fusion research

August 5, 2017August 5, 2017

Machine-learning researchers at Google Research have developed in collaboration with researchers at Tri Alpha Energy a new computer algorithm which has significantly speeded up the optimization of its C-2U plasma generator.

On 25 July, the researchers published a report in the journal Scientific Reports describing the “Optometrist Algorithm” , a machine-learning tool that aids in choosing parameters to hold hotter nuclear plasma for longer periods in fusion experiments, one of the keys to cracking the complex code of nuclear fusion.

China achieves the world’s longest high confinement fusion discharge

July 14, 2017

The EAST machine. Source: Institute of Plasma Physics Chinese Academy of Sciences

The Institute of Plasma Physics at Chinese Academy of Sciences have set a new world record in fusion by achieving 101.2 seconds in the so-called H-mode confinement regime in a fusion reactor on the 3rd of July.

The experiment was conducted on Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor at the Institute of Physical Science in Hefei, China.