Seminars

Buildings use 40% of all our energy.  Most of this energy (nearly 70% for non-residential) is used for building systems with the goal of providing comfort for the building occupants. There exists a mismatch between simulation defined energy use ranges, and recent findings suggest that the human and its behaviour should be included.

The extensive studies of MHD instabilities in thermonuclear magnetic confinement experiments, in particular of the tokamak as the most promising candidate for a future energy producing machine, have led to an ‘intuitive’ description based on the energy principle that is very misleading for most astrophysical plasmas.

In this seminar I will share my view on how the energy system might evolve: What is easy? What is difficult; What do we need to do or decide today? What can wait? All of this is ambiguous and widely differing views can sometimes result from subtly different assumptions about environment, technology and society.

Magnetic helicity, a measure for the linking and knotting of magnetic field lines, is a conserved quantity in Ideal MHD. In the presence of resistivity, helicity constrains the rate at which magnetic energy can be dissipated.

For DEMO liquid metal plasma facing components are considered due to their resilience to erosion through flowed replacement, potential for cooling beyond conduction and inherent immunity to many of the issues of neutron loading compared to solid materials. The development curve of liquid metals is behind that of e.g.