Future Research Plans: Exploring Materials for Nuclear Fusion Reactors

While nuclear fusion takes momentum toward a safe and renewable source, the most recent breakthrough on ignition at LLNL brought us one step closer. But among all these problems in making this energy conversion efficient, there has always remained the development of various advanced materials capable of surviving extreme conditions like high magnetic fields, high-intensity heat fluxes, and intense radiation in the core of the fusion reactor.

I plan to work on these challenges by developing integrated FEM and ML techniques for computational material design. In magnetic confinement reactors, plasma-facing materials, while components in inertial confinement systems, must be hyper-resilient-criteria very hard or impossible to experimentally test for under such extreme conditions. Computational approaches now provide a unique opportunity to simulate, design, and assess properties via Digital-Twin virtual Models, beyond the reach of conventional experimental techniques. It is my aspiration to contribute to this exciting frontier by investigating microstructural evolution and defect mechanisms in these materials, which will pave the way toward the development of next-generation materials that will enable sustainable fusion energy.