ESC research group news

DIFFER researcher Hari Varadarajan receives a 2025 EUROfusion Engineering Grant (EEG). This award is given to outstanding early-stage engineers, working on key technological challenges essential to the European fusion programme. Varadarajan wins this prestigious award for his project ‘Cooperative control for fusion’. 

Every week a different scientist takes over the X-account of the Universities of the Netherlands to tell something about the world of science. From 2-6 September it was Matthijs van Berkel's turn. Moreover, the group leader of the Energy Systems and Control group took part in the NPO Radio 1 programme De Nacht Van. 

A Dutch-American team of researchers has discovered that the beam to suppress plasma instabilities in a nuclear fusion reactor becomes two to three times broader than calculated. This is a challenge, because such a spread-out beam is much weaker, and there isn't always extra energy to make a stronger beam. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nuclear Fusion.

Dinesh Krishnamoorthy (DIFFER and TU/e) is the recipient of a EUROfusion Engineering Grant. This has just been announced by EUROfusion. Krishnamoorthy will investigate how to keep a nuclear fusion power plant under control in real-time.

Fusion scientists at DIFFER, together with an international team of groundwater researchers, have written a paper on new ways to determine how fast groundwater enters or exits the river. This is directly related to how the temperature in the riverbed changes. By measuring the temperature at different soil depths, they can determine the relevant heat transport parameters.