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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Our experience as summer interns at the BSC Fusion Group

Guillem and Ruth working on their project during the Summer HPC Internship Programme at the Fusion Group.

We are Guillem and Ruth and during this summer we have been working in the Fusion Group in the frame of BSC International Summer HPC Internship Programme and, in this post, we are delighted to share with you our experience.

Our supervisor during the internship was Dani Gallart, who introduced us to the basics of Fusion and, more specifically Ion Cyclotron Resonance Heating during the first weeks through some books and papers as well as personally explaining to us several concepts. Of course, he guided us through the whole project and provided us with the necessary advice when dealing with the simulation codes.

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DEMO Prospective R&D Workshop looks ahead to opportunities and challenges in fusion industrialization

Source: EUROfusion

In early October, group members Ezequiel Goldberg and Adriana Ghiozzi attended the second biannual DEMO Prospective Research and Development Workshop hosted by EPFL and organized by EUROfusion.

DEMO, or the DEMOnstration fusion power plant, refers to fusion devices to be developed post-ITER which, unlike ITER, will be connected to the electric grid and demonstrate net power production in a closed fuel cycle. Broadly, the goal of the workshop was to identify and discuss the current technical, engineering, and economic gaps between a DEMO device and a future fleet of fully-industrialized electricity-producing fusion devices.

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A Summer Research: Theoretical Investigations of Thermal Properties of Irradiated Tungsten

Figure 1: Top: An Illustration of the Fusion Reaction, with our visitors Dominik Freinberger (left) and Arda Erbasan (right), Bottom: Defected simulation box: red, blue, and purple balls represent interstitials, vacancies, and undamaged tungsten atoms, respectively. Dislocation loops and segments are denoted by continuous green lines.

Hi! We are Arda Erbasan and Dominik Freinberger. Together, we would like to share our experience working in the BSC Fusion group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in the summer of 2022.

Thanks to the PRACE Summer of HPC (SoHPC) program, we had the opportunity to work on the project Fusion reactor materials: Computational modeling of atomic-scale damage in irradiated metal during July and August. It was a great experience, and in the following, we give more details on who we are, what we did, and how it was, so stay tuned!

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