Looking at your cell phone, you realize the battery is low, which means you have to make another long walk into town to pay money to charge the device. By the time you get home, it’s getting dark. You light the kerosene lamp that casts a dim glow across the room. A significant amount of […]
Aquatic Animals That Jump Out of Water Inspire Leaping Robots
Ever watch aquatic animals jump out of the water and wonder how they manage to do it in such a streamlined and graceful way? A group of researchers who specialize in water entry and exit in nature had the same question and are exploring the specific physical conditions required for animals to successfully leap out […]
Peak Performance: New Stellarator Experiments Show Promising Results
Imagine building a machine so advanced and precise you need a supercomputer to help design it. That’s exactly what scientists and engineers in Germany did when building the Wendelstein 7-X experiment. The device, funded by the German federal and state governments and the European Union, is a type of fusion device called a stellarator. The […]
Gamma Ray Camera Offers New View On Ultra-High Energy Electrons In Plasma
Researchers at General Atomics (GA) have invented a new kind of gamma ray camera that can image beams of energetic electrons inside ultra-hot fusion plasma. The device is used in ongoing global research that is developing fusion into a new clean energy source. Turning fusion fuel into extractable energy requires it to be hotter than […]
Fusion Reactor Designs With ‘Long Legs’ Show Promise
Magnetic fusion is all about managing the interface between hot plasma and ordinary materials. The strong magnetic field in a tokamak — the vessel used in this fusion approach — is a very effective insulator; it is able to reduce the plasma temperature by a factor of 100, from over 100 million degrees Celsius at […]
General Atomics Breakthrough Enables Greater Control Of Fusion Energy
Researchers working at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at General Atomics (GA) have created an important new tool for controlling fusion plasmas that are hotter than the sun. Energy and momentum in DIII-D’s magnetically contained plasma is delivered by large neutral-particle beams systems, and GA’s recent demonstration of precise control of injected power and torque […]
Alcator C-Mod Bows Out With A New World Record
On its final day of operation, the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Plasma Science & Fusion Center (Figure 1) set a new record for plasma pressure in a magnetic confinement device. These results help validate the high-field approach to fusion energy, which could lead to smaller, cheaper fusion power plants. Fusion […]
Daring Move For First US-China Fusion Team
The way to increase the power and efficiency of magnetic fusion energy may be to risk running the plasma – hotter than 100-million-degrees C – closer than ever to the wall, according to new experimental results achieved by the first U.S.-China fusion research team. The way to increase the power and efficiency of magnetic fusion […]
Breakthrough In Superconducting Materials Opens New Path To Fusion
In fusion reactor designs, superconductors (which suffer no resistive power loss) are used to generate the magnetic fields that confine the 100 million degree C plasma. While increasing magnetic field strength offers potential ways to improve reactor performance, conventional low-temperature superconductors suffer dramatic drops in current carrying ability at high magnetic fields. Now, the emergence […]
Helping General Electric Upgrade the U.S. Power Grid
When researchers at General Electric sought help in designing a plasma-based power switch, they turned to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). The proposed switch, which GE is developing under contract with the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, could contribute to a more advanced and reliable electric grid and help […]