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Fusion roundup: Helion sets temperature record; Inertia raises $450M
Two start-ups working to commercialize fusion energy made headlines last week. Helion Energy announced that its Polaris prototype fusion energy machine recently demonstrated measurable deuterium-tritium fusion and achieved a plasma temperature of 150 million degrees Celsius (MºC). Newcomer Inertia Enterprises announced that it has raised $450 million in its Series A fundraising round.
Re’em Harel, Stanislav Burov, Shay I. Heizler
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 6 | June 2021 | Pages 578-597
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1829345
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, a spatio-temporal approach for the solution of the time-dependent Boltzmann (transport) equation is derived. Finding the exact solution using the Boltzmann equation for the general case is generally an open problem and approximate methods are usually used. One of the most common methods is the spherical harmonics method (the approximation), when the exact transport equation is replaced with a closed set of equations for the moments of the density with some closure assumption. Unfortunately, the classic closure yields poor results with low-order N in highly anisotropic problems. Specifically, the tails of the particles’ positional distribution as attained by the approximation are inaccurate compared to the true behavior. In this work, we present a derivation of a linear closure that even for low-order approximation yields a solution that is superior to the classical approximation. This closure is based on an asymptotic derivation both for space and time of the exact Boltzmann equation in infinite homogeneous media. We test this approximation with respect to the one-dimensional benchmark of the full Green function in infinite media. The convergence of the proposed approximation is also faster when compared to (classic or modified) approximation.