The 3rd edition of the Fusion Teacher Day took place on the 14th of October. This event is organized by Fusenet and its goal is to promote fusion science and technology among European secondary school students. Our group collaborated in this edition with the participation of Dani Gallart.
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.
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.
On 4 August, our Fusion group’s members Ezequiel Goldberg and Martí Circuns i Duxans attended a Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) colloquium entitled “Advancing Methods for Fusion Neutronics: An Overview of Workflows and Nuclear Analysis Activities at UKAEA” with invited speakers Alex Valentine (Senior Nuclear Radiation Analyst) and Jonathan Naish (Lead for STEP Neutronics) from the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).
Ezequiel and Martí found the Colloquium highly interesting, informative and directly relevant to the activities in our group. In particular, within FusionCAT project, we are developing a high-fidelity deterministic neutron transport solver called NEUTRO (an exhaustive description of the solver can be found in here) which solves the Boltzmann stationary transport equation. The solver was created within the Alya system: a Finite Element, parallel, multi-physics framework created at BSC designed to solve different physical phenomena in a coupled way.
It is our pleasure to host the 3rd Fusion HPC Workshop as an online event on December 15-16, 2022.
This workshop follows the virtual 2nd Fusion HPC Workshop, which took place on December 2-3, 2021, and attracted 234 registrations from all over the world.
On 27 June, group members Julio Gutiérrez and Mary Kate Chessey attended a Materials Square webinar (#118) titled, “Machine learning interatomic potentials for modelling radiation damage,” with invited speaker Professor Kai Nordlund of Computational Materials Physics from the University of Helsinki, Finland.