Apr 8, 2024 08:10 PM
Apparently 3D-printing or something suddenly made gigantic, powerful, permanent magnets feasible (after all these decades).
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https://gizmodo.com/fusion-reactor-princ...1851387646
EXCERPTS: A team of physicists and engineers at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory built a twisting fusion reactor known as a stellarator that uses permanent magnets, showcasing a potentially cost-effective way of building the powerful machines. Their experiment, called MUSE, relies on 3D-printed and off-the-shelf parts.
[...] “Using permanent magnets is a completely new way to design stellarators,” said Tony Qian, a graduate student at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and lead author of two papers published in the Journal of Plasma Physics and Nuclear Fusion that describe the design of the MUSE experiment. “This technique allows us to test new plasma confinement ideas quickly and build new devices easily.”
Permanent magnets don’t need electric current to generate their magnet fields and can be purchased off-the-shelf. The MUSE experiment stuck such magnets onto a 3-D printed shell.
“I realized that even if they were situated alongside other magnets, rare-earth permanent magnets could generate and maintain the magnetic fields necessary to confine the plasma so fusion reactions can occur,” Michael Zarnstorff, a research scientist at the laboratory and principal investigator of the MUSE project, in a press release. “That’s the property that makes this technique work.” (MORE - missing details)
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https://gizmodo.com/fusion-reactor-princ...1851387646
EXCERPTS: A team of physicists and engineers at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory built a twisting fusion reactor known as a stellarator that uses permanent magnets, showcasing a potentially cost-effective way of building the powerful machines. Their experiment, called MUSE, relies on 3D-printed and off-the-shelf parts.
[...] “Using permanent magnets is a completely new way to design stellarators,” said Tony Qian, a graduate student at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and lead author of two papers published in the Journal of Plasma Physics and Nuclear Fusion that describe the design of the MUSE experiment. “This technique allows us to test new plasma confinement ideas quickly and build new devices easily.”
Permanent magnets don’t need electric current to generate their magnet fields and can be purchased off-the-shelf. The MUSE experiment stuck such magnets onto a 3-D printed shell.
“I realized that even if they were situated alongside other magnets, rare-earth permanent magnets could generate and maintain the magnetic fields necessary to confine the plasma so fusion reactions can occur,” Michael Zarnstorff, a research scientist at the laboratory and principal investigator of the MUSE project, in a press release. “That’s the property that makes this technique work.” (MORE - missing details)