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tech2 news crews
November 28, 2018 at 11:24 pm (Eastern Time)
Over the last five months, physicists from the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Germany have conducted a second series of tests on a nuclear fusion device for the lasting fusion energy to come out of the human imagination
The team Announces that it has gone through many steps to achieve this goal, data from these tests showing that the reactor has broken several world records.
Nuclear Fusion Reactions
Nuclear reactors are designed to mimic the mechanism used by stars, including our Sun, to produce an almost infinite amount of heat and light. To do this, it fuses two atoms of hydrogen, which releases huge amounts of energy. This process, called nuclear fusion, is commonly touted as the future of clean and virtually unlimited energy.
The Wendelstein 7-X reactor. Image reprinted with kind permission: IPP
Many reactors and nuclear energy projects around the world have managed to maintain these fusion reactions for several minutes at a time. But for nuclear fusion reactions to be sustainable, plasma (atoms charged with a gas at very high temperatures) must be suspended by a magnetic field at extremely high temperatures for the atoms to fuse.
Researchers do not know exactly what. The temperature should be, but agree that the reaction would require at least 6 times the central temperature of the Sun: 15 million degrees Celsius.
The Wendelstein Stellarator 7-X
The Appliance Used by Most Reactors In the world, donut-shaped tokamak is used to attempt these fusion reactions. The German reactor Wendelstein 7-X uses a vertiginous number of twists in which the plasma is contained with the help of a magnetic field. This type of device – a stellarator – uses a complex three-dimensional arrangement of coils and loops to control the flow of hot plasma into the loops of the device, keeping it that way.
The Wendelstein 7-X reactor is the largest stellarator reactor on the market. world. Image reproduced with kind permission: IPP
The Wendelstein 7-X has now set records in producing the highest density of plasma (2 x 10 ^ 20 particles per cubic meter) and the highest High energy density (over a megajoule) The team also claims that it managed for the first time to achieve prolonged plasma reactions of 100 seconds – another record for a stellarator device.
Although the reactor was designed and switched on. for the first time in 2015, as a proof of concept and not as a source of real energy, this would provide evidence that stellarators are a good concept of sustainable nuclear fusion facilities – if successful.
remains a heavyweight though.
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