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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Our group at the European Researchers’ Night

The European Researchers’ Night is a Europe-wide public event, which brings research and researchers closer to the public and showcases its impact on citizens’ daily lives in a fun and inspiring way. The European Researchers’ Night attracts each year more than 1 million visitors in Europe and beyond.

All types of public, from schools, families and children to young people or adults of all ages, can learn about and participate in the science of their territory through different activities such as workshops, talks, shows, experiments, astronomical observations and games.

The European Night of Research is a European scientific dissemination project promoted by the European Commission within the framework of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions of the Horizon Europe program.

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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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Private fusion industry is growing in both investment and confidence, says FIA’s 2022 Annual Report

The Fusion Industry Association (FIA), a non-profit advocacy organization representing nearly 30 fusion start-ups, released its second annual report on the state of the global fusion industry this July. The report provides an update on the milestones achieved in the last year by each of 33 companies surveyed as well as an aggregated picture of growth in the industry as a whole using data collected from the companies.

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Evolution and validation of neutron simulations with NEUTRO – Article in Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion

Building on the work described in our previous posts (please see links below), we have continued developing NEUTRO, the neutronics module in Alya. The latest advancements are portrayed in the article entitled “Validating NEUTRO, a deterministic finite element neutron transport solver for fusion applications, with literature tests, experimental benchmarks and other neutronic codes” that has been recently published in Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion (PPCF).

Neutron damage to fusion reactor materials and tritium self-sufficiency are two significant challenges that need to be solved for fusion to be a viable energy source integrated with the electricity grid. The development of future fusion reactors requires a thorough understanding and the ability to predict these processes, which in turn means highly demanding simulations need to be performed to assist in the analysis of the consequences of neutrons interacting with the vast array of reactor components.

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