DIII-D National Fusion Facility

DIII-D is an active participant in the ITPA meetings that provide forums for close international collaborations to support ITER. Team members recently participated in the 35th ITPA Scrape-Off-Layer and Divertor Topical Group meeting in Prague, Czech Republic. This group focuses on plasma-material interactions at the interior tokamak wall, transport of impurities, and the confinement across the core/edge interface. At the recent meeting, three DIII-D team members presented data on different aspects of the behavior of boron, which is commonly used to thinly coat (condition) the interior wall surface in tokamaks. Key areas included modeling of solid boron injection, scaling of results across multiple devices, and analysis of deuterium fuel retention in boron powder. These results will help inform the conditioning and operation of ITER and other fusion devices in development. #fusionenergy #ITER #ITPA #cleanenergy #scientificprogress #collaboration #conditioning #tokamak #materialscience #divertor #scrapeofflayer

As the race to fusion commercialization continues to heat up, DIII-D plays an essential role in supporting all types of designs for a fusion reactor. DIII-D's role as a test bed ensures that the fusion community can investigate multiple approaches and identify the most effective design through the scientific process. Our Director Richard Buttery recently spoke with The New York Times about the value of this flexibility and the comprehensive data generated at DIII-D, particularly for fusion companies making key decisions for their designs. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/dP9rGbn4 #fusionenergy #fusionindustry #fusioncommercialization #cleanenergy #testbed #publicprivatepartnership #scientificprogress #industrypartner #collaboration #scientificprocess #scientificmethod

Interested in learning more about how high-performance computing is enabling fusion scientists to do better experiments and accelerate the path to commercialization? Join us at SC24 to see how U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Integrated Research Infrastructure is connecting DIII-D with supercomputing resources to speed innovation. Our team will lead a demonstration with National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, and Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), providing a live look at a DIII-D experiment using supercomputing resources to analyze data on-demand and apply those results to decide on how the next shot in the experiment should proceed. Join us at the DOE Booth (Booth #3401) at 7:00 pm EST! Want to know more but can't attend SC24? Learn more about this collaboration here: https://lnkd.in/g_4EFmVY SC Conference Series David P. Schissel Sterling Smith #fusionenergy #supercomputing #SC24 #DOE #IRI #HPC #highperformancecomputing #bigdata #experiment #liveexperiment #demo #collaboration #innovation #cleanenergy

Join us in celebrating the veterans from across all branches of the US Armed Forces who are part of DIII-D. These men and women contribute essential skills and expertise toward our goal of turning fusion into a clean energy source, and we're proud to have them on our team today and every day. Happy Veterans Day! #fusionenergy #veteransday #veteranemployment #veteransinSTEM #cleanenergy

Commercial fusion energy production will require stable plasma with good confinement within the fusion device. Magnetic islands are instabilities in the plasma that can grow until they disrupt confinement. A team led by Laszlo Bardoczi from UC Irvine evaluated the behavior of ion temperature within islands to better understand island destabilization. They identified a steep temperature gradient within islands and performed computer modeling to predict the cause of this change. Their results improve the physics understanding of magnetic islands, which will enable better prediction of island behavior in future fusion reactors. Learn more at the U.S. Department of Energy Science Highlight: https://lnkd.in/efA2mJtj #fusionenergy #plasmaphysics #temperaturechange #ion #magneticisland #iontemperature #computermodeling #simulation #research

Congratulations to DIII-D team member Carlos Paz-Soldan on his selection as a 2024 American Physical Society Fellow! Carlos is an Associate Professor of Applied Physics at Columbia University, where he leads a team studying plasma physics. The team works on plasma instabilities and control for tokamaks, including designing technologies to maintain plasma stability in fusion devices. Carlos also serves as the Chair of the DIII-D User Board, helping to guide programmatic decisions on participant opportunities & activities and maintain program alignment with US fusion goals. We look forward to more great work from Carlos in the future! #fusionenergy #plasmaphysics #research #APS #APSFellow

Neutral beam injection is an essential heating approach for research tokamaks that introduces high-speed neutral particles to a plasma to heat the ions in the plasma. However, electrons that are produced from injected particles have the potential to cool the plasma. Zhao Bingzhe, as a The University of Texas at Austin graduate student, monitored electron temperature during neutral beam injection to explore the physics underlying the effects of hot ions and cool electrons derived from injected neutral particles. The competing effects allowed Bingzhe to determine the neutral beam deposition profile, improving the ability to monitor fusion reactions in research devices. Learn more in the DOE Science Highlight here: https://bit.ly/4foFyTD #fusionenergy #studentresearch #phdproject #research #neutralbeam #heating #cooling #plasmaphysics #ions #electrons #cleanenergy

DIII-D is celebrating a major milestone: 200,000 plasma shots! Friends of the program from government, academia, national facilities, and industry worldwide joined us to mark this incredible achievement representing continuous progress and innovation on the path to making fusion energy a reality. Each plasma shot is more than a test; it's a question asked and answered, a technology or material investigated, and ultimately another step toward fusion energy production. These shots also reflect the evolution of the program, with constant upgrades to the facility and device ensuring that DIII-D's flexibility, world-leading diagnostics, and unique capabilities are used to address the most important challenges remaining in fusion science. But the heart of this milestone? It's the people who make up the DIII-D program. From students to senior scientists and engineers, hundreds have contributed their expertise and passion to build DIII-D into the essential and innovative program it is today. Our program continues to bring together talented people from academia, national labs, and a growing network of private companies from around the world to identify and develop solutions for fusion energy. As we look to the future, we're excited to continue our vital roles in the US fusion program and global efforts to harness clean, virtually limitless fusion energy. Onto the next shot! Learn more about how DIII-D is accelerating the path to fusion commercialization here: https://bit.ly/3UsT5kR Special thanks to our in-person speakers: DIII-D Director Dr. Richard Buttery, Dr. Anantha Krishnan of General Atomics, Dr. Jean Paul Allain of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Congressman Scott Peters, Congressman Darrell Issa, Dr. Ide Shunsuke of National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST), Dr. Mickey Wade of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Dr. Theresa Wilks of Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT, Karl Schultz of General Atomics, and Dr. Kyle Callahan of Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education #fusionenergy #DIIID #fusionenergysciences #DOE #userfacility #milestone #scientificmilestone #scientificadvance #technologicaladvance #commercialization #publicprivatepartnership #tokamak #workforcedevelopment

DIII-D continues to support the fusion industry by providing a highly flexible and well-diagnosed platform for testing the materials and technologies needed for fusion commercialization. Congratulations to Next Step Fusion on their successful testing of their machine learning model for plasma control on DIII-D! Special thanks also to DIII-D team members Dmitri Orlov and Randall Clark from UC San Diego for their key contributions to these experiments! #fusionenergy #tokamak #AI #machinelearning #plasmacontrol #plasmaphysics #fusioncommercialization #cleanenergy

While many solid materials have been proposed for the interior wall of fusion reactors, liquid metal walls have the advantages of being self-healing and handling higher heat flux. One of the leading materials for liquid metal walls is liquid lithium, but there is still little known about liquid lithium interactions with plasma in a fusion reactor-relevant environment. To explore this area, Maria, a graduate student at DIFFER, used the Divertor Materials Evaluation Station (DIMES) system to expose liquid lithium to the DIII-D plasma environment. The liquid lithium sample was exposed in a 3D-printed tungsten capillary porous system (CPS), an additively manufactured mesh designed to function as a protective but porous cage for the lithium sample. The experiment aimed to study the effectiveness of the CPS in limiting liquid lithium leakage and droplet ejection. How lithium moved throughout the tokamak and what effect liquid lithium had on the plasma were also investigated. Maria's results will be used to evaluate the performance of the CPS containing liquid lithium and advance the technology readiness level of liquid metal designs. #fusionenergy #liquidmetal #liquidlithium #reactorwall #materialsresearch #materialtesting #technologyinnovation #TRL #FPP #fusioncommercialization #fusionindustry