From May 6th to 8th, two members of our Fusion group, Pau Manyer and Hernán Domingo, participated in the 12th International BSC Severo Ochoa Doctoral Symposium 2025, presenting the latest progress and results of their ongoing projects. This event provides an opportunity for MSc and PhD students, as well as early postdoctoral scientists, to present their research projects in either oral or poster format. This edition saw more than 40 participants from a variety of backgrounds disseminate their research topics and achievements.
On the first day, Pau presented the recent advances he has made in developing the EQUILI module within the Alya4Fusion project. The project’s goal is to create a new high-performance computing numerical tool capable of simulating various physical phenomena and mechanical processes that occur in nuclear fusion reactors. Built on the multiphysics finite element solver Alya, this code is designed for use on the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer and aims to assist engineers and physicists in designing the next generation of tokamaks and stellarators. These devices are key to the industrialisation and commercialisation of fusion energy.
EQUILI computes the equilibrium configuration in axisymmetric plasma systems (i.e. tokamaks). The most recent work focuses on improving the treatment of vacuum vessel walls, implementing a high-order approximation for the plasma boundary and using the ghost stabilisation method to improve accuracy.
On May 8th, Hernán presented the latest developments in EMWAVE (formerly MAXWEL), a full-wave frequency domain solver that uses FEM. Since last year’s symposium, many improvements have been made to the code. Most importantly, new meshes have been included, including those resembling a tokamak cross-section, and finite sources representing antennas can now be implemented. The code has also been integrated into the Alya framework.
Like EQUILI, EMWAVE is also a module of Alya4Fusion, which is used to simulate the dynamics inside a fusion reactor on the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer at BSC.
In addition to the presentations by Pau and Hernán, our senior researchers, Dani Gallart and Alejandro Soba, contributed to the collaborative spirit of this interdisciplinary event by acting as chairman and reviewer, respectively.