Researchers at Lehigh University have made a remarkable discovery: mayonnaise, the humble condiment, is playing a crucial role in unlocking the secrets of nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun. This unexpected collaboration between science and the kitchen is shedding new light on the complex challenges of harnessing this clean and virtually limitless energy source for the benefit of humanity.
Futuristic Mayonnaise Power
Mayonnaise is helping researchers at Lehigh University, led by Arindam Banerjee, the Paul B. Reinhold Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics, to deepen understanding about the physics involved in nuclear fusion.
Inertial confinement fusion -the process that keeps our sun burning- slams down fuel capsules to create tiny but extraordinarily high-energy plasmas, sufficient to release energy in a controlled environment. However, a major problem with this process is the occurrence of hydrodynamic instabilities such as Rayleigh-Taylor instability which may lower the energy yield.
The plasma of fusion reactions behaves in a similar way to the mayonnaise — a soft solid — that Banerjee and his team are using for their experiments. The researchers operate a custom-built rotating wheel facility that enables them to replicate the plasma flow conditions, and then study how the mayonnaise morphs from being in an elastic mode into a stable plastic mode and ultimately to an unstable flow.
That understanding has given researchers new insight into the transition from one phase to the next, with potentially important consequences for how they control stability and extract energy from fusion reactions.
Connecting Experiments and Reality
The high-temperature, high-pressure plasma of a fusion capsule is not even remotely similar to the properties of mayonnaise, and Banerjee and his team know that. But they have managed to span both systems by non-dimensionalizing their data so they are expressing the relevant quantities in their experiments in a way that is agnostic to the orders of magnitude difference between for the two.
By doing this, the researchers envision they will be able to improve the ability of their analog experiments using mayonnaise to act as models for predicting outcomes of real-world fusion capsules.
A new paper published by the team in Physical Review E, shows that all of these phase transitions can be explained together through a common set of transition criteria between phases of Rayleigh–Taylor instability and how these transitions govern the growth of perturbations in the subsequent phases. The researchers have pinpointed precisely when elastic recovery might be sufficient to either delay or perhaps even prevent the instability.
This discovery is paramount and researchers could use it to design fusion capsules so that they do not become unstable, one of the key steps in tapping into the power of fusion energy.
Conclusion
It serves as an example of how those in the scientific field have been able to come together and work with out-of-the-box solutions, such as mayonnaise. Using the special properties of this common material, they’ve revolutionized how we approach one of the most difficult scientific and engineering challenges in human history: nuclear fusion, the cleanest and potentially limitless energy source ever discovered. In doing so, the scientists are taking aim at a dream — fusion energy, which they hope will soon be able to be realised around the world £1mayonnaise spoonful at a time.
