New record for fusion

New experimental results from the largest and most sophisticated stellarator

In Wendelstein 7-X, helium is ionized and heated to 50 million degrees Celsius where it is confined by strong superconducting magnets, which are cooled to minus 270 degrees Celsius. The superconducting magnets create helical magnetic field lines that have been carefully optimized so that fast-moving charged particles remain trapped on a toroidal surface. Like other magnetic confinement devices, turbulence appears in the heated plasma that causes heat and particles to wander across these surfaces and ultimately come into contact with the first wall surrounding the plasma. The characteristics of this turbulence are critical to understanding how to build energy-producing reactors in the future.

"Particles need to be transported to the target, to the outside, and this edge region is very important for particle confinement," said Shaocheng Liu, an author on the paper.

Their paper reports the first measurements of the plasma turbulence at the edge of Wendelstein 7-X. Using a multi-tipped probe, the turbulence is seen to propagate in the direction of ion flow, have a broadband spectrum and change character upon changes in the magnetic topology at the edge.

"At the beginning we knew nothing about turbulence behaviors in the Wendelstein 7-X because it's a completely new device," Liu said. "Initially we didn't consider all the factors, like the angle and alignment of the local flux surfaces, but we [found] that we must consider these things because of the three-dimensional structures in the stellarator, so we changed the design of the new probes."

Things are moving along

a reply to: punkinworks10

In Wendelstein 7-X, helium is ionized and heated to 50 million degrees Celsius where it is confined by strong superconducting magnets, which are cooled to minus 270 degrees Celsius. The superconducting magnets create helical magnetic field lines that have been carefully optimized so that fast-moving charged particles remain trapped on a toroidal surface.

sciencedaily.com article

The actual article, Characteristics of the SOL turbulence structure in the first experimental campaign on W7-X with limiter configuration, is about the 2016 runs on W7-X.

Who ever wrote the press release knows nothing about nuclear fusion! First off, helium was used in cleaning runs of the reactor vessel. The actual data in the article says it is the first runs of W7-X which, if it was after Angela Merkel pushed the big red button, then it has been and will be runs of hydrogen. The temperature varies and they have not reach 50 million degrees Celsius... yet. The divertor that they currently have in place is passively cooled and cannot operate at super high temps for very long (they did 40 mil. °C, for 200 ms, at a decent pressure, on their last run. Got themselves a world record for sellarators in the process!). Next, the magnets do not "create helical magnetic field lines" they are made and arranged in such a manner that their field lines do two things, create a helical field, and, flip the magnetic field (why a stellarator has a twist in it).

SOL is "scrape off layer" turbulence and is where plasma might interact with the first wall. That was allowed to happen after it was cooled down and vacuum confirmed. They shot helium through in December 2015 to "clean" the surface of any particles. After the cleaning, they took a few weeks off, then did the big media, hydrogen plasma because the vessel had been scraped clean by the helium plasma.

The person that wrote the SD article might have confused what the DOI article was saying, with what W7-X is designed for, and where they are at. As it is, it is a confused mess!

Here is how I read the DOI article. "SOL probe from the cleaning run of helium plasma had to be updated due to plasma flux and the interaction with probe's poloidal field needed to protect it from the reactor's plasma. Further corrections for the new configuration of the probe within W7-X and the protective magnet filed were needed after those updates".

When talking about the super cold you usually emphasize the point by using Kelvin. The magnets operate at 4 K (-269.15 °C) and those degrees Celsius, even if fractions of a degree, mean the world at those temps! And you don't round down but up! And 3T is not a super strong magnetic field. It was just that they did not have better superconducting magnets back then so used what they had.

We are between runs, so I expect people to write their scientific papers but I wish that they would get the details right on the press releases! Maybe I should go be an editor or something for IPPP? I will leave SD to their own devices!

PS - List of XML and HTML characters, at Wikipedia. It is handy when trying to get a scientific or math symbol to "look good" in a post. Copy the decimal number and put an "&" followed by "#" then the number in one big ugly mess. Psst, you have to use them in your profile's tag line if the punctuation marks do not show up.

¿Que?

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

We are between runs, so I expect people to write their scientific papers but I wish that they would get the details right on the press releases!

Yeah.

Like how `Omuamua was speeding up.

a reply to: Phage


Tag! You're it!

a reply to: Phage


Check this one out!

The story is about the W7-X fusion device, world record, clean energy, blah, blah, blah, but then an attempt is made to explain how it works...

A stellarator is a type of fusion reactor that uses superconducting magnets to create a soup of highly charged particles called plasma. This is then heated up to fuse the hydrogen atoms that release energy.

Stellarators have mostly gone out of fashion in the 1960s when Soviet scientists unveiled the donut-shaped tokamak, examples of which are MIT's Alcator C-Mod and Tokamak Energy's ST40.

Both fusion reactors use magnets to generate plasma, but stellarators use a bank of magnetic coils to keep the plasma in a twisting, spherical shape.

TechTimes.com, June 28, 2018 - Fusion Reactor Shatters Records With Temperature Almost 3 Times Hotter Than The Sun.

Not once but twice!! *double facepalm*

"Magnets make plasma which is heated up to fuse hydrogen..." oh, my poor brain. Makes one wonder what else TechTimes gets wrong.

Maybe that is why nuclear fusion is always 30 years away!

PS - Once a dumb enough explanation is made they try to "make it happen", like the term "star in a jar". Gretchen, stop trying to make "star in a jar happen." It's never going to happen!

en.wikipedia.org...

Very inteeresting.

Now if you can turn that destabilizing gamma ray burst into a viable energy source, youre in business! it disrupts the magnetic capture there in the first place!
iopscience.iop.org...

Direct Conversion of Heat to Electricity

Smaller than a pinkie nail, the device is about 1/8 inch by 1/8 inch, half as thick as a dime and metallically shiny. The top is aluminum that is etched with stripes roughly 20 times smaller than the width of a human hair. This pattern, though far too small to be seen by eye, serves as an antenna to catch the infrared radiation.

Between the aluminum top and the silicon bottom is a very thin layer of silicon dioxide. This layer is about 20 silicon atoms thick, or 16,000 times thinner than a human hair. The patterned and etched aluminum antenna channels the infrared radiation into this thin layer.

The infrared radiation trapped in the silicon dioxide creates very fast electrical oscillations, about 50 trillion times a second. This pushes electrons back and forth between the aluminum and the silicon in an asymmetric manner. This process, called rectification, generates net DC electrical current.

The team calls its device an infrared rectenna, a portmanteau of rectifying antenna. It is a solid-state device with no moving parts to jam, bend or break, and doesn't have to directly touch the heat source, which can cause thermal stress.

In some of early materials related to Lockheed's project and Boeing's fusion "rocket" there were allusions to a breakthrough in the direct conversion of heat to electricity. Seeing as how this is coming out of a national lab, I bet this is what was alluded to.

It is a fantastic concept

Here is a new company to add to the list of privately funded companies doing the nuclear fusion thang.

Introduction link at openaccesgovernment.org - Hyperjet Fusion – Developing an Environmentally Benign Form of Energy: Fusion.

Basic rundown is this. The company has made a plasma jet gun that has many different uses. One of them being to replace lasers ala inertial confinement fusion. Their idea is to have a sphere of these plasma guns pointed at a target but instead of a frozen halrum of deuterium-tritium, they are planning on having the D-T magnetically confined. The sphere of plasma jets kick on, the sphere of plasma constricts towards the target, gaining in temperature and pressure as it collapses the target. The D-T fuses, and fast neutrons go flying anywhere and everywhere. The sphere is an evacuated chamber with a barrier of FliBe between two stainless steel spheres. The thinking is, after several million shots (less than a year), the nuclear fusion reactor chamber (and possibly the plasma guns) will show signs of embrittlement. They say, "So what? We will replace them because they are cheap compared to the amount of energy derived!"

The gritty details and why they are focusing upon this range of plasma excitation is explained in another article at openaccessgoverment.org: Physics: Plasma-Jet-Driven Magneto-Inertial Fusion (PJMIF)

The plasma jets burst at 3 micro seconds. They plan for a 1 Hz rate of firing yielding 500 MW thermal energy (the FliBe goes to a heat exchanger and breed lithium for fuel).

Formed in May 2017, Hyperjet Fusion has already generated interest from the DOE, ARPA-E, NASA, Los Alamos, and general investors. They also plan on using the plasma guns for making metallic powders, isotope manufacturing, and thermal spay deposition. They said it can also help in regular tokamaks to regulate plasma instabilities.

Sounds interesting! I have a thread up in the aircraft forum about plasma jet engines that was announced last year. The plasma jet stream can accelerate very quickly so it kind of makes sense to point them at a 3 meter chamber and central target to pulse drive fusion reactions. Again, the FliBe blanket is what Lockheed said they are doing with their CFR. I wonder if either company has heard of liquid lithium limiter? Anyway, another company to keep an eye on.

Where they are at in their research is the topic of the next article.

VERY NICE

youtu.be...

Here's one that made a lot of noise when they made a "discovery" several years ago at the University of Washington. They were investigating using plasma current itself to contain the plasma.

This is tricky, as UW graduate student Derek Sutherland explains. For it to work, you need not only a sophisticated understanding of the physics underlying the behavior of the plasma but also a very efficient way of driving the current. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up dumping all the energy that your reactor is producing right back into the plasma just to keep it contained—resulting in a very expensive machine that will power itself and nothing else.

According to Sutherland, the big breakthrough was UW’s experimental discovery in 2012 of a physical mechanism called imposed-dynamo current drive (hence “dynomak”). By injecting current directly into the plasma, imposed-dynamo current drive lets the system control the helical fields that keep the plasma confined. The result is that you can reach steady-state fusion in a relatively small and inexpensive reactor.

spectrum.ieee.org, Nov. 2014 - Inside the Dynomak: A Fusion Technology Cheaper Than Coal.

An overview (powerpoint, in PDF) at ARPA-E.energy.gov - Steady-state spheromaks for the pursuit of economical fusion power.

The issue is that you have get the plasma moving pretty fast to reach the point where dynamo current drive effect takes place. It could crash into the first wall and drain all the energy you were putting into it. Again, they did the technology proof of concept (they call it, "Technology Demonstration") at UW in a small prototype. That was the last I heard. There was some graduation, then spinning off a company from the aerospace school, then funding drives, that was back in 2015 or 2016 (dynomak was demoed in 2012).

Apparently, they are in the "Proof of Principal" reactor stage where they are researching materials. The reactor is called HIT-SI3, and they are using half the current heaters than they would on the next step. All six heating guns would be in place for that reactor called HIT-SIX.

I like the "steady state" idea for nuclear fusion. These guys too are doing the FliBe heat blanket and D-T reaction.

I had kind of forgot about them for a bit. They were mentioned in a list of fusion experiments using various reactor models and plasma schemes around the PNW.

Tri-cityhearald.com - Nuclear fusion isn’t as far away as you think.

TEOT is going on and on about REBCO, again!

A breakthrough treatment system for next-generation superconducting magnets: Jun Lu, a researcher at the FSU-based National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, introduced a novel method for using oxidization to treat rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconductors, a revolutionary class of potentially high-powered superconductors manufactured as long spools of tape. At present, REBCO superconductors are hampered by long magnet charging times, high energy consumption and magnetic field drift — all of which preclude the technology from being broadly applied. Lu’s oxidization process, which coats the superconductors in a thin layer of surface oxide and helps to modulate contact resistance, mitigates the technology’s drawbacks without sacrificing its many advantages. Lu and his team will receive $30,315 in funding.

News.fsu.edu, June 2018 – GAP awards to help FSU faculty push research into marketplace.

Yeah, a bit late on this but it is not often that REBCO is in the news!

This has never been made explicit in any reading material found by me about REBCO. All material is “rah-rah” stuff with only a few mentioning graining as an issue (too much space between grains causes field stability problems). This may be why the material is not being used in reactors more! Well, if a nano coating helps stabilize magnetic drift then by all means, let’s do this! The real news will come out of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory when they create and test a better coated REBCO. This is what Lockheed and MIT were looking for! Oh, they also make REBCO wires which is what MIT used to create updated HTSC magnets for their reactor.

In the PPPL simulations, magnetic flux pumping develops in "hybrid scenarios" that exist between standard regimes—which include high-confinement (H-mode) and low-confinement (L-mode) plasmas—and advanced scenarios in which the plasma operates in a steady state. In hybrid scenarios, the current remains flat in the core of the plasma while the pressure of the plasma stays sufficiently high.

This combination creates what is called "a quasi-interchange mode" that acts like a mixer that stirs up the plasma while deforming the magnetic field. The mixer produces a powerful effect that maintains the flatness of the current and prevents the sawtooth instability from forming. A similar process maintains the magnetic field that protects the Earth from cosmic rays, with the molten liquid in the iron core of the planet serving as mixer.

Phys.org, July 18, 2018 – No more zigzags: Scientists uncover mechanism that stabilizes fusion plasmas.

The tokamak simulations are getting better as more data is gathered and fed into the computer (see previous post about data sharing). While learning to heat and control plasma, they (General Atomics), found they could fire multi bandwidth neutral beam injectors to stabilize the edge plasma a year or two ago. This approach is kind of the same thing without having to fire the heating guns! They hold part in L-mode with the other part in H-mode, and as it says, the plasma get mixed together so it does not create the sawtooth plasma instability which is characteristic of magnetic flux pumping. Nobody knew where mag-flux pumping (that was cool to type!) was coming from until the paper was written then demoed on the computer simulation software. This is kind of like the other lady theorizing creating a plasma current from within the plasma itself at start up, then writing her findings up, then later that year, it was demonstrated at GA. Nobody includes huge, bulky solenoids in tokamaks anymore to induce plasma currents.

These findings keep costs down by removing unnecessary equipment and steps. That equates to less energy being used stabilizing plasmas which leads to a lower bar to reach break-even (where energy in equals the energy produced). If this keeps up, one day I will wake up and somebody will have a working nuclear fusion reactor that they already know how to maximize the reactions!

PS - I wrote this up yesterday. I have serious internet issues at the moment (yeah network team messing around with settings!!) which means I am using the other network feed (which is pretty much locked down from surfing the net). I had the choice to read this stuff and capture it then post today or goof off on ATS for a half-hour yesterday. Fusion won!

But the main focus is on proving out TAE’s fusion technology. [Michl] Binderbauer [new CEO] said the plasma machine — which has been nicknamed “Norman” in honor of the company’s late co-founder, Norman Rostoker — has been taken offline temporarily for an upgrade that’s expected to double its beam power levels.

Norman is due to return to service in September, and continue a campaign to show TAE’s technology can get the plasma hot enough for a fusion reaction that produces a net energy gain.

GeekWire.com, July 17, 2018 – TAE rearranges its leadership and gets ready for next chapter in fusion quest backed by Paul Allen.

In addition to the shake up (the new guy moved up from his science position), they have spun-off a couple companies to use the tech/IP they developed from their fusion device. They mentioned that the successor to Norman will be too big to house in their warehouse! Nice to hear an update about any fusion device! They also drop a couple names: Hellion Energy, and, General Fusion. And for whatever reason when talking about nuclear fusion, ITER gets tagged on for the h3ll of it!

Sometime this month, W7-X starts up to finish this year's run. In September, Norman will be firing shots. And "later this year" ST-40 will be aiming for higher temperature. And like always, no word from Lockheed on CFR status! lol.

newatlas.com...

A potential source for antimatter production:

This would "lower" the energy production necessary to catalyze the first reactions. Well, at least the costs. ^_^

The critical temperature at which a superconductor starts superconducting is what most people focus on, but it’s really a triumvirate of conditions that leads to superconductivity. There is a critical current density above which the phenomenon collapses, as well as a maximum magnetic field. A fourfold boost in the critical current value, say, would have a similar effect as a price reduction, because you could produce a stronger field with one-quarter the amount of superconductor.

Spectrum.ieee.org - The Troubled Quest for the Superconducting Wind Turbine.

I know, it looks like this is the last thing to do with nuclear fusion. But there are similarities. The other part is quoting the “fourfold boost” because I can never find it when want to reference it!

Superconducting (SC) magnets have three parts that make them work: critical temperature (Tc), current density, and max magnetic field. Fusion reactors hit that barrier in the 1990s when they could not get increasing magnetic field strength because they topped off on current density (that is a proper answer to a question asked earlier about why fusion research plateaued off in the 1990s). That is where high temperature superconductors enter and the new path forward in fusion research.

Story up at BeSaCenter.org - Lockheed Martin’s Compact Fusion Reactor.

It reads like a white-paper with lots of talk about nuclear fusion and what it means to humanity but as with such stories, there are few tidbits like a year's supply of CFR fuel is 12 kg of D-T fuel!

I'll take CFR news anyway I can get it!

My only question is, how the hell do they design something that can withstand over twice the heat that our suns core produces(roughly fifteen million° Celsius)??

a reply to: LucidWarrior

Because the reaction never comes in contact with the containment vessel, thats why all the hoohaw about magnetic fields, super conductors and what not. And a good portion of that heat is used to keep the reaction going and only a small portion of that heat is "excess" that can be used externally.

a reply to: LucidWarrior

Try more like 120 million C!

Without gravity they have to go even hotter. The density is low so it doesn’t go boom like a weapon so it will work.

Got updates coming tomorrow!!

a reply to: TEOT


What space cadet! I forgot what I was going to add on!

I think it was the out of order stories at phys.org. They should have put a story about how CVD works to grow polycarbonate lenses. Then run the fusion story because then it would make sense. This how to read them.

phys.org - In a first, scientists precisely measure how synthetic diamonds grow.

Phys.org, July 31, 2018 - Diamond – an indispensable material in fusion technology.

I was going to say something about neutral beam injection (NBI) and gyrotrons (which is what the second story is about) but completely spaced out as things got messed up here at work! Anyway, a more perfectly arranged surface allows more energy from the gyrotron through to heat the plasma was the point.

Today, is another story that involves CVD (which is covered in the first link!) and a slight variation where a hohlraum is made from man made diamond. Basically the pellet is made with hydrogen and the whole thing is blasted with lasers and diamond does not scatter the energy and is smoother which means it collapses in a more uniform manner. And they can mass produce these things!

In this study, the researchers first tried to mitigate laser imprinting. Paying attention to the fact that diamond is stiff but exhibits high elasticity under ultra-high pressure of 100 GPa, they performed basic experiments and simulations regarding the influence of material stiffness and density on mitigation of imprint perturbation. As a result, it was clarified that the perturbation of laser imprinting on the surface of a diamond capsule was reduced to approximately 30 percent of that of polystyrene, a conventional capsule material. These research results were published in Physics of Plasmas.

phys.org, Aug. 9, 2018 - Diamond capsules improve performance of laser fusion.

Shine on you crazy diamond!