PMI research group news

Who is the greatest scientific talent in the Netherlands and Belgium? Heat shield specialist Peter Rindt has a chance to win the title of New Scientist Science Talent (Wetenschapstalent) 2021. The editors of New Scientist chose the fusion researcher as a nominee from more than 50 submissions.

An important part of the future fusion reactor ITER can withstand at least a year of full power operations, write researchers at DIFFER and ITER in Physica Scripta.

Een belangrijk onderdeel van de toekomstige fusiereactor ITER is bestand tegen minstens een jaar in vol bedrijf. Dat stelden onderzoekers van DIFFER en ITER vast door stukken van de reactorwand bijna twintig uur bloot te stellen aan een intens plasmabombardement in Magnum-PSI, de enige faciliteit ter wereld die daartoe in staat is.

Peter Rindt likes to think out-of-the-box. So when his Eindhoven University of Technology supervisor Niek Lopes Cardozo asked him if they could use 3D-printing to fix a long-standing problem in fusion reactors, that is what he did. Rindt designed a divertor using liquid metal contained by 3D-printed tungsten. He successfully defended his PhD thesis in July 2019.

DIFFER group leader Thomas Morgan has won a prestigious Vidi grant to investigate the concept of liquid metal layers to protect the walls of future fusion power plants.