• Question: @all What experiment are you working on right now

    Asked by ZhewarM16 on 10 Dec 2021.
    • Photo: Kaouthar Stambouli

      Kaouthar Stambouli answered on 19 Nov 2021:

      As an electronic engineer, I do not do experiments, but I do electrical design for robots

    • Photo: Laura Wheatley

      Laura Wheatley answered on 19 Nov 2021:

      At the moment I am sitting at an electron microscope using an ionic beam to mill a tiny sample on the nanometre scale (that’s 1,000,000,000 times less than 1m). After several hours of careful preparation I will put the sample in an Atom Probe, which will fire off the atoms one at a time so I reconstruct what the original sample looked like. Using this understanding of structure we can make better superconducting magnets for fusion devices.

    • Photo: Helena Livesey

      Helena Livesey answered on 19 Nov 2021:

      I am currently doing the design work on a welding tool for ITER (a big fusion experiment in France co-funded by lots of countries, learn more at iter.org). Once I’ve finished the design, we’ll build it and do experiments to see how well it works. Then we can improve it before we need to use it in ITER.

    • Photo: Craig Hickman

      Craig Hickman answered on 19 Nov 2021:

      I am working on a robotics facility for a large science experiment in Sweden called ESS. The science experiment uses a particle accelerator to create neutrons that can be used to see things in new ways.

      The robotics facility itself is somewhat of an experiment, because we have never built anything this large before. We have put lots of work into the design, and we will test our designs multiple times before we install it in Sweden.

      This robotic facility uses 13 robots to move around, manipulate, cut up, and store radioactive material from the ESS experiment.

    • Photo: Hermione Salter

      Hermione Salter answered on 19 Nov 2021:

      I’m working on a few different things at the moment. For one of my jobs, I am working with the Chief Engineers group to learn about what they do, and this means I get to look at lots of different people’s experiments and find out about them. I’ve only just started this, but I am learning lots about robots and tools, and other cool things!

      I am also helping to design a system to go in our tritium research lab to generate hydrogen for the experiments. The generator can make 2 forms of hydrogen – protium (hydrogen-1) which is the normal hydrogen around us that just has 1 proton in its nucleus (the stuff at the centre of the atom); and deuterium, which is a heavier type of hydrogen with 1 proton and 1 neutron in the nucleus. If you want to know anymore about atoms and our fusion fuel, feel free to ask! 🙂

    • Photo: Ben Pritchard

      Ben Pritchard answered on 22 Nov 2021:

      I’m building a camera that uses microwaves to image a plasma. If you google MAST-U plasma, you’ll see something like a glowing cored apple.

    • Photo: Priscilla Ting

      Priscilla Ting answered on 23 Nov 2021:

      I am currently not working on any physical experiments. However part of my role as a mechanical analyst is to look into the simulation of the in-vessel components in the reactors.

      So we use computational software that could mimic or predict what will happen to certain parts of the components when things like thermal heat or mechanical load hit its surface. This is so we could analyse and know how much the component can withstand before it fails! This is really important as we look at really high temperatures, sometimes up to 10,000 °C and more!

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