Divertor heat flux challenge and mitigation in SPARC

Owing to its high magnetic field, high power, and compact size, the SPARC experiment will operate with divertor conditions at or above those expected in reactor-class tokamaks. Power exhaust at this scale remains one of the key challenges for practical fusion energy. Based on empirical scalings, the peak unmitigated divertor parallel heat flux is projected to be greater than 10 GW m−2. This is nearly an order of magnitude higher than has been demonstrated to date. Furthermore, the divertor parallel Edge-Localized Mode (ELM) energy fluence projections (~11–34 MJ m−2) are comparable with those for ITER. However, the relatively short pulse length (~25 s pulse, with a ~10 s flat top) provides the opportunity to consider mitigation schemes unsuited to long-pulse devices including ITER and reactors. The baseline scenario for SPARC employs a ~1 Hz strike point sweep to spread the heat flux over a large divertor target surface area to keep tile surface temperatures within tolerable levels without the use of active divertor cooling systems. In addition, SPARC operation presents a unique opportunity to study divertor heat exhaust mitigation at reactor-level plasma densities and power fluxes. Not only will SPARC test the limits of current experimental scalings and serve for benchmarking theoretical models in reactor regimes, it is also being designed to enable the assessment of long-legged and X-point target advanced divertor magnetic configurations. Experimental results from SPARC will be crucial to reducing risk for a fusion pilot plant divertor design.

A Fast-Efficient parallel processing algorithm for straight line detection

<p>This work presents a novel method for detecting straight lines in an image at a very high speed with optimum number of processors and their functionalities. The method can be used to extract straight lines directly from an image without noise removal and pre-processing. First the square image is converted to a binary edge image using a parallel edge detection mechanism. The parallel edge detection mechanism used in this work is capable of producing edge image within a short time. Then the binary square image is transferred to a system having large number of Processing Elements (PEs). A PE has only limited jobs such as pixel scanning, compare line length with nearby PEs and transmit data to the Main Control Unit (MCU). The MCU collects data from all PEs and evaluates straight lines. Even if the number of PEs is high, it is comparatively very much less than the parallel Hough Transform method and practically implementable using recent ULSI technologies.</p>

Parallel Image Completion with Edge and Color Map

Over the last few years, image completion has made significant progress due to the generative adversarial networks (GANs) that are able to synthesize photorealistic contents. However, one of the main obstacles faced by many existing methods is that they often create blurry textures or distorted structures that are inconsistent with surrounding regions. The main reason is the ineffectiveness of disentangling style latent space implicitly from images. To address this problem, we develop a novel image completion framework called PIC-EC: parallel image completion networks with edge and color maps, which explicitly provides image edge and color information as the prior knowledge for image completion. The PIC-EC framework consists of the parallel edge and color generators followed by an image completion network. Specifically, the parallel paths generate edge and color maps for the missing region at the same time, and then the image completion network fills the missing region with fine details using the generated edge and color information as the priors. The proposed method was evaluated over CelebA-HQ and Paris StreetView datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that PIC-EC achieves superior performance on challenging cases with complex compositions and outperforms existing methods on evaluations of realism and accuracy, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Threading Screw Dislocations in a Two-Phase Plate and a Two-Phase Sphere

A screw dislocation perpendicular to free surfaces and an interface in a two-phase plate, and a screw dislocation piercing a two-phase hollow sphere are considered. The analytical solutions of the boundary-value problems have been found for the first time with the help of the virtual defects technique. Elastic fields of the screw dislocation in the plate are presented in the form of integrals with Bessel functions. Elastic fields of the screw dislocation in the hollow sphere have the form of series with Legendre polynomials. Stress distributions in both of the considered geometries are plotted. The influence of the geometric parameters of the considered solids and the ratio of the shear moduli on the stresses is analyzed. The interaction of a screw dislocation with a parallel edge dislocation is discussed.