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Photos courtesy of the researchers.
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The pursuit of fusion as a safe, carbon-free, always-on energy source has intensified in recent years, with a number of organizations pursuing aggressive timelines for technology demonstrations and power plant designs. New-generation superconducting magnets are a critical enabler for many of these programs, which creates growing need for sensors, controls, and other infrastructure that will allow the magnets to operate reliably in the harsh conditions of a commercial fusion power plant.
A collaborative group led by Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) doctoral student Erica Salazar recently took a step forward in this area with a promising new method for quick detection of a disruptive abnormality, quench, in powerful high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. Salazar worked with NSE Assistant Professor Zach Hartwig of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) and Michael Segal of spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), along with members of the Swiss CERN research center and the Robinson Research Institute (RRI) at Victoria University in New Zealand to achieve the results, which were published in the journal