About
Greg works primarily on High-power RF for heating and current drive at PSFC.
- He has two active projects:
- Heat pipes for passive cooling of fusion reactor components. Inside the heat pipe would be a molten salt or a liquid metal. Could be used to cool the RF antennas, or parts of the first wall (but not the divertor, because the heat fluxes are too high there). This is funded by Eni via the MIT Energy Initiative.
- High-throughput alloy design for fusion RF antennas. Normally, people use low-activation steel (see Low-activation materials) coated with copper. But the steel has poor thermal conductivity, and plating copper is hard. Some new copper alloys (GRCOP)are promising but they contain 4% Nb, which would make it “high-level waste”. So Gregory Wallace and Mike Short are collaborating on a high-throughput alloy synthesis and testing system, supported by molecular dynamics simulations. (Note: Mike Short is also applying this technique to other applications with Kevin Woller). This is funded by the Department of Energy.
I’m a research scientist at the PSFC with expertise in radio frequency / microwave technologies and their application to fusion plasmas for heating and current drive purposes. I was a graduate student on the Alcator C-Mod project, and transitioned to the a member of the staff after that. I collaborate with fusion experiments in China (EAST) and France (WEST), and work closely with colleagues at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Oak Ridge National Lab, and San Francisco State University through domestic collaborations. I’m an experimentalist at heart, although these days most of my work is computational. I’ve recently branched out into materials science and machine learning research as well. I have been working remotely since 2018, but I’ll be in Cambridge May 8-10. I’d be happy to meet with you then to discuss what you’re doing with ProtoVentures and how that might interface with my research. Or we can always connect over zoom sometime if that doesn’t fit your schedule.