Google awarded a UT-led research team part of a $36 million fund to investigate nuclear fusion using artificial intelligence, according to an Oct. 16 news release.
The funding, provided by the Google.org Impact Challenge: AI for Science, will be dispersed over the next three years while the team receives support from Google, according to the news release. The UT team was selected to receive funding for their research on stellarators, a type of nuclear fusion machine, said Joshua Burby, an assistant professor of physics and the principal investigator on the project.
“Stellarators are a type of fusion reactor that, for a long time, had been overlooked as not competitive,” Burby said. “If you go back to the early days of fusion research, the first concept that was actually proposed for a fusion reactor was the stellarator.”
Aerospace engineering professor Tan Bui-Thanh and physics research associate professor David Hatch are co-principal investigators on the team. The project also includes professors from New York University and the University of Washington.
They are one of 17 teams receiving a portion of the fund. The funds will mainly go to the salaries of the researchers who work on the project, Burby said.
Google awarded funds in two categories: health and climate science. UT received funds for the climate resilience category because stellarators generate fusion energy, a clean energy source, Burby said.
The goal with their research is to make stellarators “as economically attractive as possible,” Burby said. They plan on doing so by shrinking the device size, which requires complex calculations that they’re able to accelerate through the help of AI.
“Now that we have all these wonderful AI tools, we can actually use those to accelerate the calculations,” Burby said. “(We can) take a calculation that would have taken a year, and change it into something that we might do in just a few moments.”
