Our fusion lectures in the UPC Fusion Technology Course

Dr Mervi Mantsinen giving her lecture at UPC.

This spring our fusion group contributes for the fourth consecutive year to the Fusion Technology Course of the Nuclear Engineering Master organized by Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain.

This course is designed to offer 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). The course is coordinated by Dr Shimpei Futatani who moved from our Fusion group to UPC last year.

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Getting ready for new experimental campaigns at JET

Mervi Mantsinen and Dani Gallart at JET.

The Joint European Torus (JET) is getting ready for a new campaign with deuterium (D) fuel mixture at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), UK. After this D campaign, a tritium (T) campaign is planned to follow. These campaigns are made in preparation for the eventual D-T campaign with a fusion reactor relevant 50%-50% D-T fuel mixture. It will be the second D-T campaign at JET; the first D-T campaign at JET was carried out in 1997. The production and physics of born alphas (He-4) at 3.5MeV due to D-T fusion reactions will be tested and assessed with the ITER-like-wall made of beryllium (Be) and tungsten (W).

As high-performance discharges are sought, the control of high-Z impurity transport will play a key role during this campaign. One of the main goals is to keep the impurity accumulation at the plasma core low. In this regard, large efforts have been carried out by the experimental and modelling team during the preparation of these campaigns.

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Talk on Applied High Temperature Superconductivity


Professor Edson de Pinho from Universidad Federal Rural de Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ) together with our collaborator Dr. Xavier Granados from Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Barcelona (ICMAB) visited today the MareNostrum Supercomputer and met the Fusion Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).

Professor de Pinho gave a talk entitled “High temperature superconducting devices and risk analysis: usual approach and improvements for design and evaluation” in which he presented some of the activities carried out by the UFRRJ Laboratory of Superconducting Materials and Devices (LMDS).

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WPCD Code Camp at Innsbruck with Gloria Falchetto

This week, WPCD developers from all around EUROfusion countries have met at Innsbruck, Austria, in the last WPCD code camp of 2018. 37 participants have been working on various activities, all of them aligned towards the European integrated modelling efforts. Discussions have been carried out in the integration of codes within the IMAS (Integrated Modelling & Analysis Suite) ant ITM aiming to bring together codes from fusion research centers.

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Group member defends his thesis

Our Fusion group member Marc Fuster has successfully presented his final Bachelor thesis in Physics entitled “Application of the Edge-Based Finite Element Method for fusion plasma simulation” based on the work he has been carrying out since last August in our group under supervision of Dr Shimpei Futatani. The defense took place at the Faculty of Sciences of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.

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Plenary talk on HPC at HTS workshop

Xavier Sáez.

Our researcher Xavier Sáez gave a plenary talk on “HPC for solving multi-physics problems” at the 6th International Workshop on Numerical Modelling of High-Temperature Superconductors (HTS) in Costa de Caparica, Portugal.

Xavier focused his speech on the importance of multi-physics simulations to capture all relevant phenomena to model and simulate complex systems, and the key role of High-Performance Computing (HPC) due to the high computing resources required in those simulations.

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