Daniel Gallart

PhD Student

FuseNet Teacher Day 2023

Teacher Day 2023 announcement

The FuseNet Teacher Day is an annual event organized by FuseNet which closes the gap between research/industry and high school education. Its main purpose is to motivate students in the rich field of fusion physics and technology. It is typically addressed to professors, who receive a nice set of educational material and a gentle overview of fusion technology on the shoulders of the main research labs in each European country. 

We are happy at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to organize together with Fusion for Energy (F4E) the Catalan session, as done in previous editions (see here). This year the session has been covered by Dr Ferran Albajar (F4E) and Dr Dani Gallart (BSC). The Catalan session, which typically lasts 1 hour, is entirely devoted to the understanding of the key features and advantages that fusion technology has to offer. We also elaborate on the educational materials available and after that we engage in an interesting and enthusiastic discussion with all the audience. We appreciate the interest and the time that professors invest in our talk, and we hope all the material and motivation we try to send during the session is useful and ultimately transferred to the students. The students are the future of our society and so, of fusion technology as well. 

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Disseminating our research in Fusion at the 16a Festa de la Ciència

On Saturday, June 10, took place the 16a Festa de la ciència in the Rambla of Prim of Barcelona. More than 6000 assistants came to this science dissemination event organized by the Ajuntament of Barcelona and counted with  176 activities and engaged more than 150 city entities related to science and dissemination. As last year, our Fusion Group participated to disseminate Fusion technology among the event participants.

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ITER and BSC sign a new Agreement on Scientific and Academic Collaboration

Sky view of the ITER site in Cadarache, south of France.

The ITER organization and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) have signed an Agreement on Academic and Scientific Cooperation early this year. This Agreement underlines the importance of promoting academic and scientific progress between the two institutions. Thus, boosting the training of young researchers and engineers by giving the possibility of joint supervision of PhD students and training and exchange of scientists and engineers. Among other possibilities, the door is also open for joint research projects on nuclear fusion.

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Recent research on plasma heating by the Fusion Group

Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion logo.

The Fusion Group has been working hard to improve our understanding of the deuterium-tritium (D-T) plasmas carried out at JET during late 2021. These experiments broke the world fusion energy record and are providing us with invaluable physical insight in preparation of ITER’s experiments.

Our research has culminated in two recent papers published at Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion. One tackles the optimization of the H and 3He minority heating schemes for D-T, while the other describes a recent upgrade we developed for the calculation of the diffusion operator. A brief overview is given together with their links to the journal version as follows.

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Fusion likes breaking records!

Images of the different experimental fusion devices, from left to right: KSTAR, NIF, EAST.

On a previous post, we commented about the recent record achieved by the Joint European Torus (JET), in a unique set of D-T experiments. In this post, we would like to add several other records set by other fusion devices. In particular, we will be talking about the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR), the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) and the National Ignition Facility (NIF). By all means, we can say that the period from 2020 up to the near future, will be remembered as a period of success and milestone fulfillment in the fusion field.

A distinction should be made between KSTAR, EAST and NIF as the physical mechanism to reach nuclear fusion is different. While KSTAR and EAST are two superconducting tokamaks, i.e. they rely on superconducting magnets which constraint the plasma shape and dynamics, NIF is a fusion device consisting of several lasers which heat and compress a small amount of a hydrogen (or an isotope as deuterium) pellet. Both mechanisms are known in the fusion field as, magnetic confinement fusion and intertial confinement fusion, respectively. Let’s now have a look at their respective records.

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