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| Starlite/ARIES |
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| Starlite/ARIES |
Our systems assessment group helps to develop and analyze advanced fusion concepts for their potential to provide economic power for the future. Our group has been working in this area over the past twenty years. The work has been funded by the US Department of Energy, Electric Power Research Institute, universities, national laboratories, and private industries. We, as a team, have examined many fusion concepts, including tokamaks, stellarators, Elmo Bumpy Torus, low aspect ratio, laser confinement, and heavy ion beam confinement. We recently assessed a high-power-density tokamak with an advanced, reversed shear plasma containment for a commercial electric power plant in a study called ARIES-RS. The ARIES team is currently designing and assessing a low-aspect ratio tokamak device for a commerical application. The Boeing group is currently concentrating on assessing alternate commercial products for fusion (see the new publication on Alternate Applications at the end of this page for more information.)
The Starlite/ARIES project is a design and systems assessment funded by the U.S. Department of Energy through its Office of Fusion Energy Science, OFES and led by the University of California, San Diego. Professor Farrokh Najmabadi, of UCSD, is the Program Manager and Lester Waganer of Boeing is the Deputy Program Manager. The Team is comprised of members from:
Our Starlite/ARIES Team recently designed and analyzed the reversed shear tokamak as both demonstration and commercial power plants. An overview of the Starlite/ARIES project is available in a paper by F. Najmabadi, M. Tillack, L. Waganer, and the ARIES Team from the recent 16th IEEE Symposium on Fusion Engineering, entitled: "The Starlite Project: The Mission of the Fusion Demo". The team has physicists, engineers, system analysts, and economists to help assess the attractiveness of various options. Our team has a systems code that simulates the performance and cost of all the plant's systems and helps optimize the plant for the best performance and economics.
On 18 August 1996, a new strawman for the Reverse Shear Concept, ARIES-RS, was generated by Los Alamos National Laboratory with the project's systems code. This latest ARS strawman has a new blanket and shield (dependent upon first-wall neutron wall loading) and new physics that include neon line radiation and a new current-drive model with Zeff dependency. The revised ARIES-RS computer-generated elevation view also incorporates the geometry of the access port for the maintenance of the power core. At MDC, our engineers converted the referenced computer-drawn schematic, along with the design information developed by the ARIES team, into a CAD drawing that represents the power core components necessary for the power plant operation. The figure below illustrates a view of the complete power core with a portion of the outer components removed to view the interior of the core.
These two papers were presented at the 19th Symposium on Fusion Technology, Champaign, IL, September 16-20, 1996.
For more complete information about AIRES and related publications of the team, contact the ARIES Public Information Web Site at the University of California, San Diego