Monitoring & metering
Machine 3: Vacuum chamber surrounded by 192 capacitors
Monitoring in the race to create a fusion reactor
Digitisers from Spectrum Instrumentation are being used in the race to create a fusion reactor for limitless clean energy. The digitisers are used to monitor the complex fusion firing of 2.5 MJ that takes only two microseconds
releases energy as they combine and is the reaction at the heart of the sun. With no dangerous waste products and a virtually limitless supply of these atoms from sea water, billions have been spent on fusion research. However, recreating the extreme conditions of temperature and pressure on earth are not easy. A British company called First Light Fusion (FLF) is pioneering a very different approach to fusion. Inertial confinement fusion for energy
F
generation is a well-established research field and is being pursued in many laboratories worldwide, perhaps most notably in the US at the National Ignition Facility. FLF is exploring a number of alternative research directions that harness the same fundamental physics, with the prime focus being power generation. FLF’s work to-date has included theoretical analysis, detailed numerical simulation and experimental validation. This has allowed description of the accessible parameter space and has led to a clear vision of the pathway to fusion.
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usion has long been viewed as the ultimate goal for energy generation. Smashing together deuterium and tritium atoms
FLF has also considered the costs and
engineering practicalities of a reactor implementing its technology and can articulate a number of advantages over other approaches. The company is pursuing pulsed power driver technology, which it believes will reduce
costs by an order of magnitude. Additionally, the energy focusing processes
being pursued form the foundations of a new technological platform where secondary opportunities exist in a number of alternative applications, for example material
Spectrum M2i.4912-exp digitiser cards are used to acquire hundreds of machine diagnostics from each capacitor
August 2019 Instrumentation Monthly
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