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Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Latest News
Steam is a sign of cooling system function . . . at ITER
Steam from one of ITER’s ten induced-draft cooling cells offers visual confirmation of a successful cooling system test, the ITER organization announced April 30. ITER’s cooling system features 60 kilometers of piping with pumps, filters, and heat exchangers that can pull water through at up to 14 cubic meters per second. Once fully operational, two cooling loops—one to remove the heat generated by the plasma in the ITER tokamak and one for its supporting infrastructure—will be capable of extracting up to 1,200 MW of heat.
P. B. Parks, N. Alexander, C. Moeller, R. Callis
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 4 | May 2015 | Pages 792-801
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-834
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes two intermediate-scale experiments designed to test basic principles of waveguide pellet acceleration, a novel method of using microwave power to generate propulsive thrust from flash vaporization of a “pusher” medium to accelerate a frozen deuterium-tritium fuel pellet. Results from a low-power stage I experiment using a surrogate pusher consisting of an inert medium with volume-distributed metallic particle absorbers are in good agreement with Parks' wave attenuation theory. In stage II, a high-powered short-pulsed gyrotron source will be used to vaporize a surrogate pusher in a closed system (waveguide/test cell) without an accelerating projectile (pellet) to create a thrust-generating gas of interesting pressures ∼60 to 100 bars and temperatures ∼600 to 1000 K. To compare theory and experiment, the vaporization of various volatile organic compounds with suspended metallic particle absorbers must be examined from a detailed thermodynamic perspective, given that large deviations from ideal-gas behavior arise from the intermolecular forces when these solvents transition from ambient to a dense, warm, supercritical fluid. Using the Peng-Robinson real-gas equation of state, a closed-form expression for the specific internal energy U(V, T) was found that self-consistently includes the intramolecular rotational-vibrational energies, of relevance when measurements of the expanded gas state are taken on timescales faster than the molecular decomposition time. Other thermodynamically significant properties, such as the Joule-Thomson inversion curve, that were calculated from this treatment are in excellent agreement with reported experimental data. This lends further support to the use of surrogate pusher media in place of deuterium.