Professor David Moxey, King’s College London

The world’s first commercial nuclear fusion reactor will secure a long-term, sustainable and net zero source of energy for future generations. The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) aims to position the UK as a world-leading institution in fusion and has the ambitious goal of designing a commercially viable reactor by the 2040s. To meet this deadline, Professor David Moxey and his team will consider a new approach to reactor design that can avoid the bottlenecks of building physical reactors, a difficult, costly and prolonged process spanning many years.

This Research Chair will use computation at a previously unseen scale to model reactors in a flexible, virtual environment. Despite the potential for this ‘in silico’ process, given that they now have access to huge resources through the world’s latest exascale supercomputers, there is a gap between the state-of-the-art in fusion modelling software and the ability to use these supercomputers to their full potential. In part, this is owing to the complexity of fusion: engineers need the flexibility to investigate interactions of many performance-critical parameters and their impact on phenomena such as plasma turbulence that can significantly affect reactor stability.

Working closely with the UKAEA as the industrial partner, this Research Chair will develop a novel software framework that can overcome the challenges in describing the complexity of the plasma physics driving fusion through a modular and flexible software design. By building this using the latest high-order methods from academia that make the most out of the hardware that powers exascale computing, they will deliver a step-change in modelling capability for fusion, validating its performance and design using test cases from UKAEA. The resulting framework will enable performance far beyond current capabilities, cementing the UK’s position at the forefront of computational fusion research.