From left-right: Tan Bui-Thanh, Joshua Burby, David Hatch.
A research team at The University of Texas at Austin has been selected as a recipient of the Google.org Impact Challenge: AI for Science, and will receive funding and support from Google.org over three years to use artificial intelligence to accelerate fusion energy research. The team includes faculty from the College of Natural Sciences, The Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, and the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.
What to know:
- Shaped like a twisted doughnut, stellarators are a promising reactor design for producing abundant, carbon-free fusion energy. Their complex shapes make designs difficult and expensive to test through computer simulations.
- The team will build surrogate models that will make repeated calculations faster and more affordable. It could lead to lower construction costs for future fusion power plants.
- The team, led by assistant professor of physics Joshua Burby, is among the 17 organizations selected to receive a combined $36 million in funding.
- The project includes collaborators from the University of Washington and New York University.
The project builds on existing research and expands on one of four fusion energy seed projects recently launched with the Institute for Fusion Studies, highlighting UT Austin’s growing leadership in fusion energy and scientific machine learning.
