A star on Earth (Paolo Ricci, EPF Lausanne)

20.06.2023 14:00

Fusion, the energy source of the stars, is one of the few options for developing sustainable power supply. Fusion is based on essentially inexhaustible sources, is inherently safe and releases no process greenhouse gases. The goal of the ITER tokamak, the largest worldwide scientific experiment under construction, is to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy on Earth. This will be achieved by confining a plasma at a temperature that is ten times higher than that in the core of the Sun using strong magnetic fields. Inside a tokamak, powerful nonlinear turbulent phenomena are present, occurring on spatial and temporal scales spanning ten orders of magnitude. Turbulence is more complex in plasmas than other fluids due to the interaction of the charged plasma particles with the electromagnetic fields. Turbulence is, moreover, extremely anisotropic and include the interaction of large-scale fluid and microscopic kinetic phenomena, atomic physics processes, and complex geometries. Given this complexity, the role of numerical simulations is crucial. The goal of this talk is shining some light on the pertinent physics of a fusion device, deriving the model that we used over the last few years to describe its dynamics and the related simulation challenges, and, finally, presenting the numerical techniques we use. We will also stress the most important mathematical and numerical open issues.

Lieu

Bâtiment: Conseil Général 7-9

Room 1-05, Séminaire d'analyse numérique

entrée libre