I am Eric Planas, and as part of the BSc in Engineering Physics program at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), in February 10th I joined the Fusion Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in order to carry out my Final Degree Thesis. Now that I am finishing the project and my journey as an undergraduate student is coming to an end, I am writing this post to relate my experience in this group.
Last Friday, June 12, our group leader ICREA Prof. Mervi Mantsinen participated as an examiner in the defence of the Habilitation Thesis to Supervise Research by Dr David Zarzoso at Aix Marseille University, France.
Other jury members were Dr Sadruddin Benkadda, Prof. Alain Ghizzo, Dr. Taina Kurki-Suonio, Prof. Jean-Marcelo Rax, Prof. Raúl Sánchez, and Prof. Howard Wilson. The event took place via videoconference due to the present pandemia circumstances with strict social distancing measures which prevented the celebration of this event in person.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), the European agency Fusion for Energy (F4E) and b_TEC Foundation invite all Secondary and High-school teachers to take part in a live webinar, coordinated by the European Fusion Education Network FuseNet, with connections in Catalan and Spanish from Barcelona and English from several spots in Europe on the 2nd of October 2020.
The webinar will aim at giving teachers the tools and knowledge they need in order to introduce fusion in the classrooms. Such state-of-the-art concepts can certainly be hard to introduce into schools, thus we truly think this is a fantastic opportunity to learn how to do it.
Our BSC Fusion Group works closely with various experimental fusion devices on the design, preparation, execution, analysis and modelling of new plasma experiments. We are particularly interested in validating and testing our modelling codes against experimental data, and in using our codes for the design of new experiments.
As experimental activities in many fields of science, fusion experiments have been strongly affected by the present COVID-19 outbreak.
On May 20th, our Fusion Group co-organized, as part of the FusionCAT project that we are coordinating, a webinar on the DEMO Oriented Neutron Source (DONES) project given by Dr Ángel Ibarra, the Director of the Division for Fusion Technologies at Laboratorio Nacional de Fusión, CIEMAT, Madrid (Spain) and the EUROfusion Work Package Early Neutron Source Definition and Design Project Leader.
In his talk, which attracted a total of 113 participants with a variety of backgrounds and profiles from several countries, Ángel discussed the background of the project together with its present status and near-future plans.
On the 6 May, our group member Xavier Sáez gave an online lecture entitled “Simulation Codes in Fusion Technology” as part of the Fusion Technology Course of the Nuclear Engineering Master organized by the Department of Physics on Barcelona School of Industrial Engineering (ETSEIB) at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain.
This course offers the students an overview on selected key topics in Fusion Technology, delivered by specialist lecturers from F4E, UPC and our Fusion group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).