Planting seeds of innovation
Each year the lab provides funds to explore what some researchers refer to as moon shots. For these high-risk, high-reward projects, we are encouraged to undertake endeavors that could create a new capability or to put an intriguing twist on an existing one. Currently in FFESD, one team is wrapping up a project that was spawned from video game technology, while another team is tackling research that aims to prepare ORNL to host a fusion energy pilot plant. Below is an update on both.
—Kathy McCarthy, Associate Laboratory Director, December 2021
Ezekial “Zeke” Unterberg (left) and Chuck Kessel (right) check the helium flow loop experiment that is part of the lab’s LDRD fusion initiative for FY 2022.
Advancing the fusion frontier
Drawing talent from fission, fusion, and materials science, a team led by FFESD is exploring research that they hope will help advance the forefront of fusion energy.
“Essentially, we’re hoping that this research will help position the lab as the host of the first U.S. fusion pilot plant,” said Ezekial “Zeke” Unterberg, Group Leader of Power Exhaust and Particle Control in the Fusion Energy Division.
The project, the Validated Design & Evaluation of Fusion Wall Components Initiative, is one of seven initiatives funded in FY 2022 by the Director’s R&D Fund as part of ORNL’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD). The challenge the researchers aim to solve is the ability to predict and control phenomena around the interface of the fusion plasma and its containment wall.
“Some characterize this as the most critical thing to solve in order to make fusion energy possible,” Unterberg said.
Six teams from across FFESD, as well as materials scientists from the Physical Sciences Directorate, are tackling different projects as part of the LDRD fusion initiative.
“My team is taking the optimization software tool that we designed for the nuclear energy industry and applying it to specific areas where optimization problems pop up in the design of fusion technology,” said William “Will” Gurecky, a researcher in the Power Reactor Modeling Group in the Nuclear Energy Fuel Cycle Division. “It’s an example of how we can take our expertise from fission and use it to advance fusion.”
Michael Smith (right) holds a laptop showing what Scott Greenwood (left) sees through augmented reality goggles that are part of the VIPER project funded by ORNL’s Seed program.
Making the invisible visible
Nuclear engineers from our directorate have successfully combined augmented reality with radiation transport simulations that they believe could revolutionize radiological training across multiple sectors, from space exploration to nuclear energy to emergency response.
Called VIPER (Virtual Interaction with Physics Enhanced Reality), the project was funded with $190,000 from ORNL’s Seed Money Fund for FY 2021. Team members include Michael B. Smith, M. Scott Greenwood, Noel Nelson, and Douglas Peplow.
“We are transforming the way a nuclear worker can see radiation,” Smith said. “We take something that is invisible and make it visible.”
As opposed to virtual reality, in which users see an entirely imaginary world through goggles that shut out the real world, augmented reality technology allows the participant to see his or her surrounding environment along with a computer-generated overlay.
“When you put on our goggles and activate the system for a radiation training exercise, you see the room in which you are standing, and then as you walk around you see a colorful overlay where the radiation field is located,” Greenwood said. However, VIPER not only allows the participant to see radiation, it also provides real-time feedback on estimated radiation exposures based on the user’s behavior.
The researchers were inspired with the idea after analyzing advances in augmented reality and data visualization enabled by recent developments in the video game industry.
“Think next-generation ‘Pokémon Go” reinvented for nuclear energy,” Nelson said.
The VIPER project hopes to provide radiological workers with a better understanding of radiation by allowing trainees to see, interact, learn, and ultimately develop an innate sense for radiation that has never before been possible.