Savannah River National Laboratory to Receive $1.5M for Technology to Enable Fusion Power Plants
Savannah River National Laboratory will receive $1.5 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). The funding is part of the Creating Hardened And Durable fusion first Wall Incorporating Centralized Knowledge (CHADWICK) program, which aims to explore promising alloy design space and manufacturing processes to develop next generation materials to strengthen a fusion power plant’s first wall, which surrounds the fusion core.
SRNL will work with Colorado School of Mines and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on the Machine Learning for Alloy Discovery Coupled with Geometric Optimization for Functionally Graded Liquid Metal project.
“The fusion team at SRNL is very excited to combine our lab’s core expertise in the fuel cycle and reducing tritium retention in materials with expertise in additive manufacturing to create a project that can advance liquid first wall architectures,” said Brenda Garcia-Diaz, SRNL advisory program manager, Fusion Energy. “This project will combine the efforts of multiple partners to create solutions that will significantly increase wall lifetime and heat transfer performance.”
The project will develop a suitable material and 3D print the geometrically complex structures that will control how much liquid metal is exposed to the fusion reaction without excessive evaporation. Using liquid metal in fusion power plants provides the opportunity to continuously replace the first wall and repair the irradiation damage from the fusion reactions. The project develops novel approaches to keeping the liquid in place, and its success will help validate that the inside surface of a fusion power plant chamber can be made of liquid instead of solid material.
(© AddMeshCube – stock.adobe.com).
“The fusion plasma is many times hotter than the surface of the sun and finding materials that can live long in this environment is challenging,” said Luke Olson, primary investigator leading the project. “We are seeking to maximize the liquid metal and its benefits in the right locations and using machine learning to ensure we are not missing any optimizations.”
The project seeks to make modular components that can be plugged into a fusion machine’s interior to maximize the ratio of self-healing liquid metal over the structural metal used to contain it. The project team will then 3D print and validate these components under near prototypic conditions to demonstrate these benefits. This will help to reduce waste and improve many parameters that increase the likelihood of viable, economic fusion energy.
“Our team is very excited to be able to prove out these concepts and thankful to ARPA-E for giving us this opportunity,” said Olson.
ARPA-E advances high-potential, high-impact clean energy technologies across a wide range of technical areas that are strategic to America’s energy security. Learn more about these efforts and ARPA-E’s commitment to ensuring the United States continues to lead the world in developing and deploying advanced clean energy technologies by visiting https://arpa-e.energy.gov/