Laboratorio Nacional de Fusión

Logo of the Laboratorio Nacional de Fusión

The National Fusion Laboratory is part of CIEMAT.

The Laboratory is dedicated to the development of fusion by magnetic confinement as a future energy generation option. Research is mainly centered on the Flexible Heliac TJ-II, and on materials studies.

History

In 1975, a research group is created at the JEN (later to become CIEMAT) to study the subject of fusion. In 1983, the small tokamak TJ-I is taken into operation, followed by the torsatron TJ-IU in 1994, and the flexible heliac TJ-II in 1999.

Organization

Organization and personnel

Projects and research

• The TJ-II Project
• Plasma Physics at the LNF
• Technology
  • TECNO_FUS
  • TechnoFusión

Educational and training activities

The LNF is strongly committed with the education and training of new researchers in the field of magnetic fusion science and technology. It keeps a close collaboration on post-graduate teaching activities with Universities Carlos III, Complutense and Politécnica de Madrid. CIEMAT participates with these two latter institutions in the Campus de Excelencia Moncloa. In the last ten years, in average, three to four PhD thesis/year and four Master Thesis/year are being successfully finished in the LNF facilities.

The LNF is a major Spanish partner of the "European Master of Science in Nuclear Fusion and Engineering Physics (Fusion-EP)", under the auspices of the Erasmus Mundus. In this Master course, international students have six month-stays at LNF and receive lectures given by its staff, among others. LNF is also actively participating in a new Erasmus Mundus programme-related initiative, the Fusion-Doctoral College recently established to host PhD students and supervise their thesis. In both programmes, LNF participates in close collaboration with several national (Complutense and Carlos III, Madrid) and international universities and research institutions (Ghent Univ., Lorraine Univ., Stuttgart Univ., [www.unipd.it/en/ Padova Univ.], Instituto Superior Tecnico (Lisbon), ‎IRFM-CEA, IPP-Garching and IPP-Greifswald).

Computer resources

Due to the large computational needs of the Laboratory, it makes use of both internal and external resources through collaborations:

• The CIEMAT computing centre, with the following computers:
  • Fenix (SGI Altix system w/ Itanium processors, currently being phased out)
  • Euler (Dell HPC cluster, 1152 Xeon cores, 13.8 Tflops)
• The Barcelona Supercomputing Centre
• The Spanish Supercomputing Network
• LUSITANIA
• BIFI (at the University of Zaragoza)
• Ibercivis (Spanish computational grid)

Collaborations

The Laboratory participates in many international projects and collaborates with other institutions, such as:

• EuroFusion
• ITER
• W7-X
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• NIFS
• JT-60SA
• Universidad Carlos III, Madrid
• Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica
• Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI), Universidad de Zaragoza
• Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC)

Events

The Laboratory has organised many events, among which:

• The 21^st Symposium on Fusion Technology (SOFT, 2000)
• The 9^th EU-US Transport Task Force Meeting (TTF, 2002)
• The 32^nd European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics (EPS, 2005)
• The 15^th International Stellarator Workshop (ISW, 2005)
• The 12^th European Fusion Theory Conference (EFTC, 2008)
• The 18^th Conference on Plasma Surface Interactions (PSI, 2008)
• The 3^rd EFDA Transport Topical Group meeting and 15^th EU-US Transport Task Force Meeting (TTG-TTF, 2010)
• The 12^th ITPA Energetic Particle Physics TG Meeting (2014)

External Links

• Website of the Laboratorio Nacional de Fusión

• Website of CIEMAT