A collaborative platform for research and development for fusion power plants

Project title: A collaborative platform for research and development for fusion power plants
Main applicant: Pär Strand, Chalmers University of Technology
Co-applicants:
Uppsala University: Eduardo Pitthan Filho, Jacob Eriksson, Daniel Primetzhofer
Chalmers: Dmitriy Yadikyn
KTH Royal Institute of Technology: Lorenzo Frassinetti, Thomas Jonsson, Per Petersson
Grant amount: 27 million SEK of which 7.5 million SEK to Uppsala University for the period 07/2023-12/2027

Project description

Thermonuclear fusion has high potential as a future source of electric power as it is considered very safe and has negligible environmental impact. In future fusion reactors, energy will be harnessed from a plasma created by deuterium and tritium nuclei with plasma temperatures reaching up to 150 million degrees Celsius, ten times the temperature in the centre of the sun. One of the challenges for building a fusion reactor is maintaining a plasma that is stable, self-sustaining and allows for a controlled release of energy.

As the extreme conditions inside the fusion plasma are unprecedented on earth, the design and optimization of fusion power plants will heavily rely on advanced predictive modelling tools. The main scientific goal of this proposal is to establish a platform for fusion energy research in Sweden that will further develop and validate modelling tools necessary for power plant design and their integration into state-of-the-art simulation frameworks. These models will encompass different parts of the plasma: the inner core, the outer plasma as well as the interactions of the plasma with the materials the plasma-containing vessel is built from, so called plasma-facing materials.

The proposal builds on the development of models as well as machine learning from experiments performed by the Swedish research groups at major European fusion research facilities and from accelerator-based materials analysis and modification at the Tandem Laboratory. Researchers from Uppsala university and KTH will use the advanced techniques available at the Tandem Laboratory to study candidate materials for plasma-facing materials. They will perform experiments on materials modification and degradation in reactor-like conditions and provide important feedback on engineering constraints for reactor design.

The project’s second main goal is the education of the next generation of experts in fusion power plants for both the private and public sectors. To this aim, the project partners will promote further long-term research collaborations, organize seminars, provide comprehensive training in fusion R&D, and contribute to doctoral education. Two of in total six newly hired PhD students will be stationed at Uppsala University.