PPPL selected for new public-private merger partnerships

PICTURE: New round of PPPL INFUSE partners: the physicists Elena Belova, Nate Ferraro and Bill Tang. Prospect More

Photo credit: Photos and collage by Elle Starkman / PPPL Office of Communications.

Advanced skills ranging from innovative uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to cutting edge computer code have entered the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) for the third consecutive round of DOE-sponsored public-private partnerships to accelerate the production of fusion energy on earth that powers the sun and stars.

The PPPL collaborations make up three of the nine new DOE Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) partnerships and will bring together PPPL researchers with separate colleagues at Microsoft Corp., Commonwealth Fusion Systems and TAE Technologies. The selected proposals are subject to the successful negotiation of cooperation agreements for research and development (CRADA) between the companies and the national laboratories of the DOE.

Considerable advantage

James Van Dam, DOE Associate Director for Fusion Energy Sciences, welcomed the $ 2.1 million funding round and noted that new private startups are entering into collaboration agreements. “After two successful years of INFUSE, it is clear that the program offers significant benefits to the merger community.” The new round of funding, the first in 2021, responds to the growing interest and needs of companies “looking to leverage the unique expertise and capabilities of the national DOE laboratory system,” he said. To read the DOE press release, click here.

The PPPL physicist Ahmed Diallo, deputy director of the INFUSE program, confirmed this assessment. “The three projects with PPPL use the key competencies of the lab,” said Diallo. “These projects are proof that the private sector recognizes and values ​​the expertise of the national laboratories.”

Fusion, the force that powers the sun and stars, combines light elements in the form of plasma – the hot, charged state of matter made up of free electrons and atomic nuclei and making up 99 percent of the visible universe – to create massive amounts of energy. Scientists around the world are trying to create and control fusion on Earth to maintain a virtually inexhaustible supply of safe and clean electricity to generate electricity.

Below are the companies that are working with PPPL in the new round of cooperation to accelerate the development of fusion energy.

Microsoft Corporation. The software giant plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) developed by a team led by PPPL and Princeton University physicist Bill Tang to predict and control the disturbance of magnetically trapped fusion plasmas, which can seriously damage donut-shaped tokamak fusion devices . Microsoft will bring its transformative neural network technology to PPPL to work with the lab to improve dangerous disturbance prediction and accelerate advances in real-time control of fusion plasmas in tokamaks, including ITER, the international fusion experiment under construction in France.

Microsoft’s representative in this partnership is Alexey Svyatkovskiy, a senior data scientist who worked with the Tang team while at Princeton to deliver the groundbreaking predictive deep learning software the group developed. Nature magazine introduced this Fusion Recurrent Neural Network (FRNN) software in 2019. “Alexey’s in-depth knowledge of Microsoft’s deep learning capabilities makes it ideal to work with us on this exciting new INFUSE project,” said Tang.

Tang recently received another prestigious award when the DOE Office of Science’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program gave his team 45,000 node hours on the Argonne National Laboratory Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) theta supercomputer to explore the depth drive forward -learning software. The valuable computer time allocated under highly competitive proposals will be important to the DOE Fusion Energy Program’s mission and will further strengthen the link between the ASCR program and the DOE’s IT leadership facilities.

Commonwealth Fusion System (CFS). This start-up, which emerged from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is developing a compact tokamak system called SPARC with novel new high-temperature superconductors. The partnership, which follows two previous INFUSE collaborations with the laboratory, will work with PPPL physicist Nate Ferraro on developing a massive gas injection system (MGI) to mitigate plasma disruption.

“MGI is a process of injecting a large amount of cold gas into the tokamak when a fault is detected,” said Ferraro, a developer of PPPL’s ​​M3D-C1 computer code that simulates such injections in SPARC. “The goal of this project is to develop the optimal number and placement of gas injectors to reduce heat and mechanical stress on the system during these instabilities,” said Ferraro.

The collaboration is expected to have far-reaching benefits and also reduce the risk of disruption to SPARC. These benefits include developing a system with the potential to mitigate interference in other future fusion devices. In partnership with Ferraro on this project, physicist Matt Reinke, who is on leave from his long-term location at Oak Ridge National Laboratory at PPPL, works at CFS, Ryan Sweeney from MIT and engineers at CFS.

TAE technologies. This company in Foothill Ranch, California is also entering the third round of the INFUSE cooperation with PPPL. The company is developing a cylindrical field reversed configuration (FRC) fusion reactor that reduces the risk of interference by creating a high pressure plasma that is self-contained with its own magnetic field.

PPPL physicist Elena Belova, who worked with TAE on a previous INFUSE project, will use her HYM plasma simulation code to study the stability properties of the company’s FRC concept. “The code will also numerically reproduce the operational limits of the FRC,” said Belova, who will be used to develop the next-level advanced FRC device that TAE is planning.

“Our goal is to understand how these limits can be extended to a high-density regime,” said Belova, “and how the fast ions generated by neutral beam injection can affect these limits.” Sean Detrick, Director of Computational Sciences at TAE technologies, will partner with Belova on this project, which is expected to directly accelerate progress in the development of fusion energy in the private sector.

The new one-year partnerships bring the number of INFUSE collaborations PPPL has entered into since the DOE launched the novel program in 2019 to twelve engineering to accelerate the arrival of privately funded fusion energy.

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PPPL, located on Princeton University’s Forrestal campus in Plainsboro, NJ, is dedicated to creating new insights into the physics of plasmas – ultra-hot, charged gases – and developing practical solutions for generating fusion energy. The laboratory is administered by the University for the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the United States’ single largest contributor to basic research in the physical sciences and works to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. More information is available at energy.gov/science.

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