http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Release ... 11/19.aspx
http://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-o ... pId=247637
7. Alternate Fusion Concepts: Controlled fusion remains a grand multi-disciplinary challenge with potentially revolutionary commercial and military applications. Internationally, the primary efforts and facilities are focused on magnetically confined fusion based on tokamak configurations and inertially confined fusion using lasers, and to a lesser extent, pulsed power approaches. The primary tokamak and laser-based efforts are unlikely to scale to compact power plants suitable for DoD applications. Other applications, such as radiation sources relevant to DoD, require pulsed output in addition to compactness. There exists an array of less explored and less understood alternate fusion confinement concepts that could potentially achieve net gain with the desired compactness and output. These concepts range from gas dynamic traps, to spheromaks, to various pinch configurations. The performance of many of these alternate concepts can be heavily affected by kinetic behaviors in addition to the expected fluid dynamics. Validated modern simulation tools are required for effective exploration of multiple concepts in order to identify, advance, and understand the most promising configurations. DARPA seeks proposals that address one or both of the following:
• Application of new plasma simulation tools to an alternate fusion concept to provide new game-changing understanding and predictive capabilities for that concept. Proposers should explain why a particular concept was chosen for study and why it might have significant advantages in terms of its ability to reach a burning plasma state in a compact device versus other alternative concepts.
• Development of scalable and adaptable plasma simulation techniques that can account for kinetic effects of these alternate concepts in a computationally effective manner. The proposer should explain how their proposed technique compares to the state of the art, such as traditional particle-in-cell and hybrid techniques, and why the new techniques might achieve desirable reduction in computational efforts that would allow effective parameter exploration of these alternate fusion concepts.