Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is currently constructing the SPARC tokamak - a high field (12T) machine designed to achieve an energy gain of Q~11 when running in H-mode with DT fuel. Many SPARC components have already been manufactured, assembly and commissioning have begun, and preparation for operations in 2027 is underway. At each phase in the design-build-operations cycle, CFS...
The design of a commercially viable inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plant presents a formidable optimization challenge, balancing near-term technological capabilities, scientific uncertainties and the final reactor scale performance. Addressing this requires an integrated digital engineering approach. Focused Energy (FE) is developing a comprehensive digital twin (DTw) of an IFE power...
Complex multi-physics simulations are required to evaluate tritium transport in fusion breeding blanket concepts, since only such approaches can capture the coupled neutronics, thermo-fluids, and tritium transport phenomena and provide the quantitative results needed by system designers (eg. Tritium inventory, residence time, throughput…). An integrated digital workflow has been developed for...
The Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulated Environment (MOOSE) is being developed by United States National Laboratories and partner institutions around the world to support multi-fidelity multi-physics modeling and simulation of advanced nuclear systems. Among its many physics modules, it offers computational fluid dynamics, thermal hydraulics, solid mechanics (including contact), and...
Achieving reliable tritium self-sufficiency remains one of the defining challenges for fusion power-plant design, making accurate tritium fuel cycle modelling essential.
At the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, we are developing a unified digital framework that connects material-scale physics, component-level behaviour, and system-level fuel-cycle performance, informed and validated by...
Currently, the LIBRTI experimental facility is being built in the UK to serve as a test environment for tritium breeder blanket systems of various types and to accelerate technology development for fusion reactors, such as STEP. In support of the LIBRTI programme, we have developed a multi-physics simulation platform for generic breeder systems, initially focussed on liquid lithium...
As the efforts to develop a fusion pilot plant progresses, there is a significant need for open-source computational fluid dynamics tools for studying component design of Fusion Energy Systems. Plasma Facing Components (PFCs) such as the divertor monoblock experience significant impinging heat fluxes on the order of 1-10 MW/m2 and neutron heating. These high heat fluxes are often exposed to...
The stellarator’s steady-state capability offers inherent advantages for fusion power plants (FPP), including disruption-free operation and access to higher densities beyond the Greenwald density limit. However, reconciling particle exhaust and retention while fulfilling mandatory requirements of divertor life-time survival remains a critical challenge for reactor-relevant divertor operation...
The design of fusion energy devices poses great challenges to the neutronics modeling community. Fusion devices, such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems’s (CFS) SPARC, are extremely complex devices characterized by a large number of components, streaming paths, and a spatially heterogeneous distribution of materials. In addition, the building that houses these fusion devices is characterized by...
Advanced computational tools play a crucial role in ensuring the rapid deployment of fusion energy systems due to the multiphysics interactions occurring at the component level. For example, plasma-facing components (PFCs), such as the divertor, undergo thermal loads and stresses, nuclear heating from neutrons and ions, and conjugate heat transfer in the solid material regions and...
We present our recent and upcoming developments on open-source components of an IMAS simulation environment aiming at digital-twin functionality for tokamaks. These range from a convenient pulse schedule and waveform editor to control and actuator simulator interfaces and examples, stateful synthetic diagnostics, simulation databases, (experimental) data analysis pipelines, experimental...
The development of inertial fusion energy (IFE) reactors requires chambers that can withstand extreme cyclic loads, making multiphysics coupling a critical element of digital engineering for predicting integrity and safety. At EX-Fusion, we are developing a demonstration chamber—our “triple-one-ten” project—designed for 10 Hz operation with 1–10 kJ laser shots on deuterium pellets for up to...
Comprehensive digital twins for fusion devices require many components: multifidelity multiphysics modeling and simulation to describe complicated, interconnected systems; reduced-order and surrogate creation capabilities to enable designer-focused modeling; uncertainty quantification and stochastic simulation to inform design decisions; interfaces and connections to data warehouses and other...
Accurate predictions of neutron behavior are central to the design of fusion power plants, yet the confidence we can place in those predictions is often just as important as the nominal results. This talk will examine the landscape of uncertainty in high-fidelity Monte Carlo (MC) and deterministic radiation transport simulations and the steps being taken to bring rigorous uncertainty...
The ARC tokamak is a compact, high-field fusion pilot plant being designed by Commonwealth Fusion Systems to produce net electricity with high-temperature superconducting magnets. It uses a molten salt, FLiBe blanket for tritium breeding and heat removal in a simplified, high-performance design.
We present a multiphysics digital engineering workflow that integrates mesh-based Monte Carlo...
At Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), we are developing the SPARC fusion device, a high-field, compact tokamak designed to achieve net energy gain to demonstrate commercial viability of fusion energy [1]. Our fusion neutronics team is meeting the fast-paced needs of designers by executing compact, highly detailed neutronics models to influence the design of the SPARC device.
Our in-device...
A comprehensive digital twin for fusion energy requires advanced tools for handling complex 3D data. This presentation outlines an integrated technology suite that streamlines the entire simulation workflow, from mesh generation to data analysis. We have developed a robust pipeline that automates the creation of simulation-ready meshes from CAD geometry, significantly accelerating the...
Coupling of fusion device codes to engineering analysis codes present unique challenges in the physical and temporal scales the computations must take into account, range of coordinate systems, high dimensionality of phase space, and geometric complexity. These challenges require new approaches that enable efficient coupling on exascale supercomputers and afford adherence to physical...
Digital engineering is reshaping fusion R&D, and the in-development Divertor Digital Twin Environment (DDTE) aims to provide an end-to-end, open-source workflow that shortens the path from late-stage divertor design to plant operation readiness. The DDTE is organised around three complementary flavours, each deliberately modular so that best-in-class community codes can be swapped in as...
Design activities for pilot fusion power plants are progressing worldwide, with the objective of demonstrating stable, reliable energy production and economic viability. The transition from ITER to next-generation fusion power plants marks a pivotal shift from a science-driven initiative to an industry- and technology-oriented programme. Consequently, future demonstration reactors, such as...
Iterative simulations and analyses are required during a conceptual design of fusion reactor with continuous changes of the design. It is important to keep track of physical and engineering rationale for the design modifications with systematic linkages of back data. This becomes increasingly more important as the design processes become semi-automatic employing advanced design optimization...
The accurate prediction of turbulent transport in magnetically confined fusion (MCF) plasmas relies heavily on first-principles gyrokinetic simulations. However, the high computational cost of these calculations—often requiring weeks to months on high-performance computing platforms, presents a significant bottleneck for their inclusion in integrated modeling workflows and the rapid analysis...
High Repetition Rate High Energy Density (HED) physics facilities are rapidly becoming a cornerstone for the development of next-generation compute, control, and optimization infrastructures required by emerging Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) platforms. As the demand for more sophisticated and responsive experimental setups grows, the ability to efficiently process and analyze vast amounts of...
Despite the existence of physics-based turbulent transport models, new tokamaks have historically initially been designed using empirical scaling laws due to the large computational expense of physics-based models. However, these empirical models do not capture the full changes caused by alterations to the plasma composition and geometry. Here, we optimize the ARC tokamak (Howard, et al., JPP,...
A new thermo-hydraulic simulation tool, REIMS (Riemann Explicit Implicit Magnet Simulator), has recently been developed at ITER to model the behavior of superconducting magnet systems. REIMS can simulate normal operation scenarios as well as magnet cool-down, and work is underway to extend its capabilities to quench studies, with promising results for predicting stability and margin to quench....
Modeling and simulation plays a central role in fusion technology development - by allowing large parameter space exploration for design optimization, focused design of experiments and instrumentation, and safety analysis. This talk will provide an overview of the Cardinal multiphysics framework which integrates OpenMC, NekRS, and MOOSE for high-fidelity simulation. Several fusion-related...
The presentation will show how to use a Digital Engineering Environment (DEE) to demonstrate the value of Digital Engineering (DE) across the full lifecycle of a system with a traceable digital thread. We will show the use of digital artifacts across Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), Multidisciplinary Analysis and Optimization (MDAO), including the use of Digital Twins for applications...
Recent progress in the development of a virtual tokamak platform is presented, which aims to integrate physics simulations with engineering analyses for fusion R&D. The platform, named WILL (Versatile Virtual platform for Integrated fusion simuLation and anaLysis), provides such integration by flexibly and seamlessly bridging data from tokamak operations, experiments, and simulations. WILL...
Integrated modeling of fusion reactor design is essential for predicting self-consistent multi-physics loads (thermal, electromagnetic, plasma, neutron, etc.), assessing technical feasibility, quantifying uncertainties, and enabling design trade-off studies to de risk FPP concepts and guide meaningful validation experiments. The Fusion REactor Design and Assessment (FREDA) SciDAC project is...
The ability to generate actionable qualification data by modelling the coupled multiphysics of components with complex geometries in fusion-relevant environments is required in order to de-risk candidate component designs prior to installation in fusion devices. Such models demand the use of highly scalable tools on HPC systems, capable of solving coupled problems consisting of billions of...
Addressing the fusion science and technology development needs of the accelerating fusion energy deployment timeline requires a deep understanding of the interaction between materials and the complex physics and engineering processes in the extreme fusion environment. Plasma facing materials, for example, are subject to extreme thermal loads, repeated thermal shocks, and bombardment by 14 MeV...
High-fidelity nonlinear MHD simulations, such as those performed with the M3D-C1 code, are essential for understanding plasma instabilities and disruption dynamics but remain prohibitively expensive for optimization tasks and large-scale parametric studies. We present a neural operator-based surrogate model that enables both cross-machine generalization and parametric extrapolation, offering a...
Design optimization of stellarator blanket shapes is a high-dimensional, computationally expensive black box problem. Gradient-based optimization methods are well suited to find optimal solutions for this problem efficiently, when focusing on neutronic and basic economic metrics. However, due to the lack of spatial derivative information in the Monte Carlo radiation transport kernel, gradients...
Accurate simulations of the systems being designed and build by the fusion energy companies require consideration of the complex geometries of the system components. Tools being developed to support fusion energy system simulation workflows steps including (i) analysis geometry construction for general 3D configurations, (ii) fully automatic generation of well controlled meshes and adaptive...
As the push to deploy fusion energy systems continues through public and commercial initiatives, the determination of the design and accident scenarios figures of merit with the highest influence on design and safety is required. Current fusion energy system designs involve either solid or liquid blanket systems that serve the purpose of tritium (fuel) management, neutron multiplication, and...
