fusion energy developments

Joined
Feb 16, 2009
Messages
29,785
Likes
48,227
Country flag
http://www.futurity.org/helium-resistant-material-fusion-1606362/

Researchers have discovered a method for making materials that could be useful in future fusion reactors.

Fusion is the process that powers the sun, and harnessing it on Earth would provide unlimited clean energy. However, researchers say that constructing a fusion power plant has proven to be a daunting task, in no small part because there have been no materials that could survive the grueling conditions found in the core of a fusion reactor.

The sun makes energy by fusing hydrogen atoms, each with one proton, into helium atoms, which contain two protons. Helium is the byproduct of this reaction. Although it does not threaten the environment, it wreaks havoc upon the materials needed to make a fusion reactor.

“Helium is an element that we don’t usually think of as being harmful,” says Michael Demkowicz, associate professor in the materials science and engineering department at Texas A&M University. “It is not toxic and not a greenhouse gas, which is one reason why fusion power is so attractive.”


In nanocomposite solids, materials made of stacks of thick metal layers, rather than making bubbles, helium forms long channels, resembling veins in living tissues. (Credit: Texas A&M)
However, if you force helium inside of a solid material, it bubbles out, much like carbon dioxide bubbles in carbonated water.

“Literally, you get these helium bubbles inside of the metal that stay there forever because the metal is solid,” Demkowicz says. “As you accumulate more and more helium, the bubbles start to link up and destroy the entire material.”

“We were blown away by what we saw…”

Working with a team of researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Demkowicz investigated how helium behaves in nanocomposite solids, materials made of stacks of thick metal layers.

Their findings were a surprise. Rather than making bubbles, the helium in these materials formed long channels, resembling veins in living tissues.

“We were blown away by what we saw,” Demkowicz says. “As you put more and more helium inside these nanocomposites, rather than destroying the material, the veins actually start to interconnect, resulting in kind of a vascular system.”

This discovery paves the way to helium-resistant materials needed to make fusion energy a reality. Demkowicz and his collaborators believe that helium may move through the networks of veins that form in their nanocomposites, eventually exiting the material without causing any further damage.

“Applications to fusion reactors are just the tip of the iceberg,” Demkowicz says. “I think the bigger picture here is in vascularized solids, ones that are kind of like tissues with vascular networks. What else could be transported through such networks? Perhaps heat or electricity or even chemicals that could help the material self-heal.”

Can lasers make controlled nuclear fusion happen?
Demkowicz collaborated with researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Laboratory Directed Research and Development program at Los Alamos National Laboratory supported the project.

The researchers report their findings in the journal Science Advances.

Source: Texas A&M University
 
Joined
Feb 16, 2009
Messages
29,785
Likes
48,227
Country flag
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018...ee-leads-team-create-framework-optimal-fusion

Princeton astrophysicist Bhattacharjee leads team to create framework for an optimal fusion energy device
The Office of Communications
June 18, 2018 3:23 p.m.
Stellarators, fusion facilities with a “twisty” design, have long played second fiddle to doughnut-shaped tokamaks that better confine the plasma that fuels fusion reactions. Now, in a development with major implications for the effort to replicate on Earth the fusion reactions that power the sun and stars to produce a virtually limitless supply of electricity, an international collaboration led by Princeton University has won a major private grant to create the framework for an optimum stellarator that combines the best features of both types of fusion reactors.

Stellarators, fusion facilities with a “twisty” design, have long played second fiddle to doughnut-shaped tokamaks that better confine the plasma that fuels fusion reactions. Now, in a development with major implications for the effort to replicate on Earth the fusion reactions that power the sun and stars to produce a virtually limitless supply of electricity, an international collaboration led by Princeton University has won a major private grant to create the framework for an optimum stellarator that combines the best features of both types of fusion reactors.


Amitava Bhattacharjee

Photo courtesy of Amitava Bhattacharjee
The grant, a Simons Foundation Mathematical and Physical Sciences Award valued at $2 million a year for four years, marks the first award for fusion or energy that the foundation has made since mathematician Jim Simons and his wife, Marilyn, launched the foundation in New York City in 1994. Under Simons, a billionaire whose wealth comes from the Wall Street hedge fund he started after leaving Stony Brook University, the foundation funds the frontiers of research in mathematics and basic sciences.

“I cannot tell you how excited I am,” said Amitava Bhattacharjee, a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton who directs the international collaboration. “This project requires fundamental breakthroughs in physics, mathematics and computation. If successful, we will be able to design the world’s best fusion reactor with importance for the entire world.”

Sharing his enthusiasm is Pablo Debenedetti, Princeton University dean for research, who encouraged Bhattacharjee to seek the Simons Foundation funding. “What I find exciting about this is that it brings together a highly collaborative group to address very fundamental problems of enormous practical importance,” Debenedetti said.

The sun and stars produce fusion by crushing together light elements in the form of plasma — the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei — with powerful gravity. Here on Earth, stellarators and tokamaks use magnetic fields in lieu of gravity to confine and control the plasma, and temperatures hotter than the core of the sun to fuse the nuclei to release their energy.

Stellarators — first proposed in the early 1950s took a back seat a decade later to tokamaks invented in the former Soviet Union, which proved better able to confine plasma and were easier to design and build. But stellarators are now making a comeback, with major ones operating in Germany and Japan thanks to the computational capability of supercomputers and breakthroughs in mathematical techniques and physics understanding.

A key feature of stellarators is their ability to operate without the electrical current that tokamaks must induce in plasma to complete the magnetic field. Such current poses a risk for tokamaks since instabilities in the plasma can cause the release of energy stored in the current, producing disruptions that can halt fusion reactions and damage tokamak components.

An optimum stellarator would therefore combine the tokamak’s superior ability to confine the plasma with the stellarator’s ability to operate in a steady state without plasma current. The twisty magnetic fields of an optimum stellarator would have “hidden symmetries” that confine plasma in a manner comparable to the smooth, round — or “axisymmetric” — fields that tokamaks produce.

This enormously complex project — the title is “Hidden Symmetries and Fusion Energy” — will require many breakthroughs. “I think the Simons Foundation recognized both the significance of the project and the need for a broad team capable of addressing the challenging physical and mathematical tasks associated with it,” said Peter Constantin, director of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton and a founding principal investigator on the team.

The diverse group, assembled from eight U.S. universities and four international institutions, will create a code called SIMSOPT — for SIMonS OPTimization code — to produce the framework for an optimum stellarator design. “Our hope is that the Simons award will accelerate stellarator fusion,” said Per Helander, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany, home of the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator — the largest and most advanced stellarator in the world. Helander, a founding principal investigator on the collaboration team and leader of the German group that has been a pioneer in the science of stellarator optimization, will apply the SIMSOPT code to new stellarator designs. “I’m delighted to see that private money is going into mainstream fusion,” he said.

Collaborators are from Princeton, Columbia, Cornell and New York University, and from the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Maryland, and the University of Texas at Austin. International participants represent the Australian National University, the University of Warwick, the Swiss École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany.

This diverse collaboration is unique to fusion research. “Our team reflects a breadth of enterprise with mathematicians and computational experts who don’t necessarily have a lot to do with plasma physics,” Bhattacharjee said. “But these are experts who can provide breakthroughs and we are grateful to the Simons Foundation for this great opportunity.”
 
Joined
Feb 16, 2009
Messages
29,785
Likes
48,227
Country flag
India to Reboot Rs 235 Cr Superconducting Fusion Tokamak: 7 Things to Know
The Steady State Superconducting Tokamak or SST-1 is an experimental fusion reactor in the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR), Gujarat.

by Ahmed SherrifJune 21, 2018, 2:26 pm

The need for clean, renewable and limitless energy has taken humanity from burning wood to obtaining energy from the sun via photovoltaic cells. And next in the line of clean energy are fusion reactors which are touted to be “mini suns” on earth.

Fusion reactions occur when two light atomic nuclei fuse together to form a heavier nucleus and release energy. Devices designed to harness this energy are called fusion reactors.


Scientists at IPR are currently under the process of rebooting the experiment to meet the deadline of the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference. And the SST-1 will be one of the prime experiments to be showcased because of its unique capabilities.



India’s SST 1 in Indian Plasma Research. Source: IPR
Tokamaks are a type of fusion reactors which use magnetic force to manipulate plasma. Plasma is a type of matter where electrons are separated from neutrons, and this separation is usually achieved by heat. And India is a select few countries to own a Tokamak reactor.

So here are few things to know about the SST-1 fusion reactor that may be the answer to clean and limitless energy.
  • The 235 crore SST mission started way back in 1994 and was conceptualised by 2005. But it was only fully commissioned by 2013. And until December of 2017, it has conducted about 20 experiments.
  • By 2015, the SST produced repeatable plasma discharges up to ~ 500 ms with plasma currents more than 75,000 A. This gave incredible insights on how to stabilise the fusion for future experiments.



    The design of the Tokamak SST 1 (left) and a representational image of its working (right).
  • One of the great things about fusion reactors is that they use hydrogen and isotopes of hydrogen. This means energy could even be extracted from a glass of water with no harmful byproducts.
  • Routine experimentation in December 2017 revealed that the SST suffered some damage in its toroidal magnet system. “The damage is minimum. We will revive the reactor soon,” a senior IPR scientist, now part of the SST-1 team, told The Times of India.
  • The SST-1 makes use of extreme heat and strong magnetic field to fuse hydrogen isotopes and perform thermo-nuclear fusion. This results in temperatures 20 times greater than the sun’s core and a magnetic field equivalent to 1,000 times that of the earth’s normal magnetic field.



    The blueprint of the SST 1 Source: IPR
  • The SST-1 is the only Tokamak in the world to operate the toroidal magnets in a two-phase flow. This gives diversified results for a fusion study.
  • Former IPR Director D Bora told the publication how the SST-1 achievements had brought India at par with China and South Korea as one of the eight participants in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).
The SST-1 promises to hold some clues and to be insightful for future fusion projects that can yield clean energy without depending on conventional methods like coal.

(Edited by Shruti Singhal)
 

Global Defence

Articles

Top