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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
Eduardo Iraola, José M. Nougués, Lluís Batet, Josep A. Feliu, Luis Sedano
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 3 | April-May 2024 | Pages 374-390
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2260238
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear fusion depends on tritium breeding and self-sufficiency. Tritium represents a hazard due to its radioactivity and migration properties. Because of these difficulties, ITER, the largest fusion experiment so far, relies on a conservative static procedure to monitor the tritium inventory. Future commercial fusion plants can avoid operation halts if a dynamic monitoring strategy proves itself valid. Tritium plant models have been developed for this kind of monitoring and analysis task, but sensor accuracy and reliability are an issue still to be addressed, and the path to dynamic monitoring remains unclear. The present work shows the modeling procedure of the Tokamak Exhaust Processing system in a commercial simulator, Aspen HYSYS, to reproduce the inventories, streams, process conditions, and compositions of this subsystem during operation. The model is verified in a steady-state scenario using data from the available literature. A demonstration of such a tritium plant subsystem shows meaningful value for several reasons. First, this process has not been modeled before in commercial dynamic simulators, which are typically used in the process industry. It will also allow new stakeholders to participate in future fusion-related projects. Second, it will play a key role in industry-like tritium process monitoring, in which the new model will act as a digital twin of the plant. Data-driven diagnostics can be fueled by model data, helping engineers to generate additional data that could otherwise be expensive to get directly from the plant. For these reasons, models will represent an essential part of a dynamic monitoring system, necessary for feasible fusion projects.