News

JET brings the power of the Sun closer to Earth

News on the JET record (credit: EUROfusion).

We have been talking in our earlier blog posts (here and here) about the relevance of the deuterium-tritium (D-T) fuel mixture in a magnetic confinement fusion device, such as a tokamak. The intrinsic property that makes this mixture so interesting is the higher fusion cross section as compared to other ion combinations at a relatively “low” energy (around 100 keV which is already 10 times the temperature of the centre of the Sun). In other words, D-T maximizes the number of fusion reactions, which is after all, what we are looking for.

The Joint European Torus (JET) has recently finished its second D-T campaign (DTE2 as we refer to it in more technical contexts), and the results could not have been better. This culminates a huge effort from the nuclear fusion community which makes the way towards the success of ITER smoother.

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Celebrating International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2022

Celebrating women in fusion: (top, from left to right) Meera Venkatesh, Gabriele Voigt, Najat Mokhtar, Elena Buglova, (bottom, from left to right) Sibylle Günter, Min Liao, Tammy Ma, Katherine Weimer

Declared in 2015 by the General Assembly of the United Nations, International Day of Women and Girls in Science (IDWGS), celebrated every year on the 11th of February, highlights the contributions of women and girl scientists and promotes gender equality across all scientific fields.

In honor of IDWGS we have selected four outstanding women fusioneers from across the world, each of whom work to push the boundaries of fusion research and bring us closer to viable fusion energy.

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Developing a deterministic neutron transport solver – FusionCAT Task

FusionCAT is an initiative coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC) in which seven Catalan institutions team up and collaborate in the field of research and development of fusion energy technology. The main goal is to develop state-of-the-art tools to simulate coupled physics phenomena that take place in fusion reactors leveraging the advantages of high-performance computing clusters.

Future energy production fusion reactors such as DEMO are based on the massive production of plasma neutrons. This includes their impact and effects on breeding blankets to multiply neutron output and sustain the fuel cycle. To achieve efficient energy production, the fuel cycle must be understood and optimized, which is why the second project within FusionCAT, labelled “Neutronics, tritium breeding and operational fuel cycle”, is oriented towards the analysis of the interaction between neutrons and reactor components. In this project, the first task involves the development of a high-fidelity deterministic neutron transport solver called NEUTRO.

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PhD thesis on runaway-electron model development and validation in tokamaks

Dr Mathias Hoppe with his PhD thesis at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. Credit: Department of Physics, Chalmers University of Technology, 2022.

On January 14, our group leader Prof. Mervi Mantsinen had the honour of chairing the evaluation panel of Mathias Hoppe’s thesis entitled “Runaway-electron model development and validation in tokamaks” at the Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Super fast electrons, so called “runaway electrons”, can sometimes appear in fusion devices and can cause severe damage to the device wall. To develop technologies to prevent the generation of runaway electrons, advanced computer models accounting for all the relevant physics mechanisms playing a role in a fusion device are required, which constitutes the first part of Mathias Hoppe’s thesis. To ensure that the models are correct they must also be tested on the fusion experiments of today, which can be done using synchrotron radiation and the techniques developed in the second part of Mathias Hoppe’s thesis.

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Our EUROfusion Engineering Grantee wins Outstanding Presentation Award at MT27

The 27th International Conference on Magnet Technology (MT27) was held at Fukuoka International Congress Center, Fukuoka, Japan and online from November 15 to 19, 2021.

Our colleague José Lorenzo participated in the conference and presented a poster entitled “Homogenization of Winding Pack Properties for the Structural Analysis of Fusion Magnets” on the work he developed in our group within his prestigious EUROfusion Engineering Grant (EEG).

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