Chinese Academy of Sciences

Assembly Line

Chinese 'artificial sun' sets new record in milestone step toward fusion power generation

πŸ“… Date:

πŸ”– Topics: Nuclear Fusion

🏒 Organizations: Chinese Academy of Sciences


The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), dubbed China’s β€œartificial sun,” maintained a steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for a remarkable 1,066 seconds, setting a new world record and marking a breakthrough in the quest for fusion power generation.

The duration of 1,000 seconds is considered a key step in fusion research. The breakthrough, achieved by the Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP), greatly improved the original world record of 403 seconds, which was also set by EAST in 2023.

Global scientists have worked for more than 70 years on trying to achieve this feat. However, only after reaching temperatures over 100 million degrees Celsius, sustaining stable long-term operation, and ensuring controllability can a nuclear fusion device successfully generate electricity.

Read more at Xinhua

⛏️ Industrial-scale sustainable rare earth mining enabled by electrokinetics

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✍️ Authors: Gaofeng Wang, Jianxi Zhu, Xiaoliang Liang

πŸ”– Topics: Electrokinetic Mining, Sustainability

🏭 Vertical: Mining

🏒 Organizations: Chinese Academy of Sciences


Owing to their irreplaceable role in several essential technologies, rare earth elements (REEs) are critical raw materials for the global economy. However, the supply of REEs raises serious sustainability concerns due to the large environmental footprint of conventional mining processes. We previously proposed an electrokinetic mining (EKM) technique that could enable green and selective extraction of REEs from ores. Here we further develop this technique to industrial scale by addressing challenges related to electrode reliability and flow leakage and evaluate its mining efficiency, environmental footprint and economic performance. Moreover, a voltage gradient barrier strategy based on electroosmosis is developed to facilitate electrokinetic REEs mining. As a result, we successfully achieved a high REE recovery efficiency of 95% on a 5,000-ton REEs ore. A rigorous environmental risk assessment revealed a 95% reduction of ammonia emissions, indicating a notably reduced environmental footprint. A comparative technoeconomic analysis between the conventional and the EKM techniques demonstrates the economic viability of the EKM technique. This work validates a new sustainable path for REEs mining, paving the way to a greener resources supply.

Read more at Nature Sustainability

A compact elastocaloric refrigerator

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✍️ Authors: Yanliang Chen, Yao Wang, Wen Sun

πŸ”– Topics: Elastocaloric cooling

🏒 Organizations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Chinese Academy of Sciences


Elastocaloric cooling is regarded as one of the most promising cutting-edge alternatives to conventional vapor compression refrigeration systems. This technology is based on the temperature change of materials when being subjected to uniaxial stress, which has been observed in polymers, alloys, and ceramics. However, the existing elastocaloric prototypes have a bottleneck problem of an excessive mass ratio between the actuator and the solid-state refrigerant. To overcome this challenge, this study proposes an elastocaloric refrigerator using a single actuator with an inclined angle to produce a vertical tensile force to nickel-titanium (NiTi) shape-memory wires and a lateral motion to translate the NiTi wires between the hot and cold sides. The refrigerator can achieve a 90% improvement in the mass ratio between the solid-state refrigerant and actuator compared to the currently best-reported elastocaloric cooling prototype. The NiTi wires exhibit an adiabatic temperature change of 6.6 K during unloading at the strain of 4.8%. The proposed refrigerator can achieve a 9.2-K temperature span when the heat source and sink are insulated from ambient and has a cooling power up to 3.1 W under zero-temperature-span condition. By using thinner NiTi wires or NiTi plates, the developed elastocaloric refrigerator could be a starting point to promote applications of this technology in the future.

Read more at The Innovation