Honors Fusion Power Plant Project Groups

By Friday of this week, you will need to have selected which portion of the plant you want to study in detail and for which you will come up with designs. I would like to have between 3 and 4 people per team, certainly no more than 4. E mail me as soon as you have made up your mind. Rank all 6 systems in order of preference and let me know which ones you really feel strongly about. I will try my best to give you your first or second choice but we will need a complete plant or we'll produce no power.

I have included some of what you will learn and some of what you will end up calculating or selecting. DON'T PANIC: you've got lots of time to learn about this stuff; after all your very final reports are due in June. The link to the European fusion power plant report I posted will provide you with a great resource. I will also provide many additional references as needed. YOU WILL NOT BE ALONE.

The plant systems are

1) Plasma including temperature, particle density, size, heating needs. This group will learn about plasmas fuse, how particles leave plasmas, and a little bit about waves in plasmas.

2) Heating using neutral beams and electromagnetic waves including ionization and neutralization methods, voltages, currents for neutral beams and frequencies and wave lengths for electromagnetic waves. This group will learn a lot about electric forces and microwaves.

3) Magnets for confinement ( and some heating) including toroidal, poloidal and ohmic heating coils, their purposes, the current required materials used and forces they generate right in the magnet itself. This group will learn details about the relationships between currents, magnetic fields, and forces; what it takes to resist forces. They will also learn about superconductors.

4) First wall and blankets to protect plasma from outside world, breed tritium, and protect magnets from heat and neutrons. Also must be compatible with the cooling system. materials, amounts, operating temperatures, strengths required will all be addressed here. This group will learn about materials strengths, resistant to heat, neutron absorption, heat transfer, and how to make a vessel strong enough.

5) Thermodynamic system to cool the lithium, produce steam and use the steam to drive a turbine at 60 ( or perhaps just 30) rotations per second. This group will learn about thermodynamics, transfer of heat, and the mechanics of using high speed steam to push a turbine blade. Key parameters to be determined are temperatures and pressures throughout the system and flow rates of steam required, and surfaces areas needed for heat transfer. ( If you like to cook, maybe this ones for you)

6) Electric generator to convert the mechanical energy from the turbine into electrical energy. This group will learn about how to create magnetic fields using current and then using these magnetic fields to generate much larger currents. The field strengths areas of coils, numbers of turns, operating voltages and currents are all key outputs from this group.