>>14244716Hi OP. Yeah, I agree with you, those are topics that need to be addressed in order to build a functional power plant. The problem is, I don’t think I’m really interested in either of those… I tried writing in more detail the problem I’m working on and how I got there, but it came out as a sob story. I will try to be more objective this time.
I’m working on the thermal stresses that would arise on a tokamak’s vacuum vessel due to baking. Baking is a heating process performed on vacuum vessels to release particles that may have gotten trapped on its inner walls due to absorption or adsorption. These particles are to be removed from the inside of the VV before using the tokamak to produce plasma, in order to not pollute it. So basically I’m studying what are the stresses produced on the VV due to this heating process by using FEM (Finite Element Method). I’m writing FEM codes and using ANSYS to simulate the process.
Now, my advisor is great and I do enjoy working with FEM, I’m particularly intrigued by the mathematical aspect of it, like being able to find numerical solutions to differential equations, FEM is a very powerful tool for that. But when I enrolled on this Master’s I thought I would be working more closely with the “plasma” side of nuclear fusion. Not only that, but the only reason I can actually work on this problem is because the people at the lab want to install a baking system on their tokamak and needed someone to analyze it. If they didn’t have any plans for an upgrade, I wouldn’t have a problem connected to fusion to work with here in my country.
So now I’m looking for different fields related to fusion where I can apply FEM. Maybe something structural or related to plasma physics like MHD (magnetohydrodynamics). This may sound naive, but I just want to contribute in a meaningful way while doing something I love, which is solving problems using FEM.
Thanks for the interest OP.
