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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
October 2025
Latest News
DOE awards $134M for fusion research and development
The Department of Energy announced on Wednesday that it has awarded $134 million in funding for two programs designed to secure U.S. leadership in emerging fusion technologies and innovation. The funding was awarded through the DOE’s Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program in the Office of Science and will support the next round of Fusion Innovation Research Engine (FIRE) collaboratives and the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) awards.
Monica Gehrig, Joshua Schlegel, Dennis Youchison, Arnold Lumsdaine, Charles Kessel, Gary Mueller
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 7 | November 2021 | Pages 883-893
Student Paper Competition Selection | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1887717
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A helium flow loop is being assembled at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to analyze heat transfer enhancement for systems such as blanket and divertor components. To efficiently identify optimum geometries for heat transfer enhancement in these applications, simulation work is performed to optimize test section designs that are built and tested in the helium flow loop that operates at 4 MPa and a mass flow rate of 100 g/s. Different ribbed geometries that examine rib shape, rib height, rib orientation, rib spacing, and three-dimensional orientation are modeled and simulated in STAR-CCM+ to compare their ability to remove heat and mitigate pressure drop. Following the simulations, models are selected and manufactured for the helium flow loop tests. Simulations initially focus on a hydrodynamic study to determine the appropriate mesh and physics models and then add a heat flux to analyze the heat transfer abilities of the models. The simulations are run in steady state and use a Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes k-ε turbulence model. The helium is modeled as an ideal gas. The simulation explores models of geometries that enhance the heat transfer and decrease pressure drop with an overall goal of increasing fluid collision with the wall. Enhanced geometries are simulated to select appropriate designs for manufacturing, and preliminary experimental results are used to validate the simulations. The factors that are being analyzed in the comparison between the experimental and the simulated results include matching thermocouple temperatures, pressure drop, roughness, and fluid velocity.