It is called Wendelstein 7-X and it is an experimental reactor designed to produce clean energy that never ends.
A very important step for this technology
This reactor produced its first plasma six years ago and it has not been until now that the physicists in charge of its development have managed to make it do a breakthrough which would consist of making the host plasma of the reactor twice as hot as the core of the Sun.
The goal of all nuclear fusion reactors is recreate the processes that occur inside the Sun, exposing the plasma streams to very high temperatures and pressures, causing the atoms to collide and fuse together to produce a lot of energy.
The Wendelstein 7-X is such a complex structure that it took use super computers. It uses up to 50 superconducting magnetic coils to hold the plasma in place as it rotates around a circular chamber.
Three years ago, the team managed to beat energy density records and plasma confinement for such a fusion reactor.
In the experiments, the plasma was subjected to a temperature of 20 million degrees centigrade, exceeding the temperature of the sun by five million. But if they seem like extreme temperatures, it is believed that the reactor can reach much more heat.
Design optimization, key to performance improvement
One problem the engineers had to deal with was prevent the reactor from losing heat. This occurred because when the hot particles collided, some of them went out of their orbit and were outside the magnetic field. Therefore, the magnetic field box of the reactor was optimized to prevent this from happening.
Therefore, the new optimized design of the reactor allowed to achieve a performance never seen before. In this way, it is verified how important it is to optimize the systems in order to maximize their operation. In fact, it is a very important news inside the world of nuclear fusion.
This very high performance is described as “modest heating power” and allows temperatures up to twice as high as those inside the Sun.
By next year, the team already has scheduled more experiments where a new design of the refrigeration system will be included that will allow the tests to last longer. Meanwhile, we will have to continue to overcome possible inconveniences that may arise throughout the development process.