The annual European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics will be held this year in Leuven, Belgium from July 4th to 8th, 2016. The BSC fusion group is preparing its participation to this biggest European plasma physics event.
Fusion Research on the Rise
Fusion Research is on the Rise concludes AcademiaNet and includes BSC Fusion Group Manager Mervi Mantsinen.
The physics professors Sibylle Günter, Ursel Fantz, Mervi Mantsinen and Tünde Fülöp have a far-reaching goal: to build a nuclear fusion reactor that produces clean energy analogous to the Sun’s energy generation.
MIT researchers discover an explanation to heat loss
[source: MIT news]
One of the biggest obstacles to making fusion power practical — and realizing its promise of virtually limitless and relatively clean energy — has been that computer models have been unable to predict how the hot, electrically charged gas inside a fusion reactor behaves under the intense heat and pressure required to make atoms stick together.
Now, researchers at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, in collaboration with others at the University of California at San Diego, General Atomics, and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, say that they have found the key.
PhD dissertation: Xavier Sáez
Xavier Sáez, researcher at Fusion group, presented his PhD dissertation with the name Particle-in-Cell Algorithms for Plasma Simulations on Heterogeneous Architectures. The presentation, hosted by the UPC on 25 January 2016 at 11:00, discussed research on PIC codes on trending hardware architectures and new programming models.
BSC PATC: HPC-based simulations, Engineering and Environment
From next February 16 until February 18, BSC will hold the PATC course HPC-based simulations, Engineering and Environment. There will be a series of talks concerning HPC modeling and simulation at Barcelona Supercomputer Center. Dr. Xavier Sáez will give a talk focusing on the following topics:
- Simulation on plasma and fusion physics.
- Current state of ITER project.
- Numerical methods in HPC.
- Present challenges and future milestones.
Wendelstein 7-X produces its first plasma
The new fusion reactor Wendelstein 7-X finished its construction on October 2015. Experimentation with Germany’s newest fusion reactor is beginning to heat up, to temperatures of around 80 million degrees Celsius, to be precise.