The Faculty of Engineering at University of Southern Denmark contributes to enabling fusion power through research in remote maintenance of future fusion power plants. The aim of the research is to design fast and safe remote maintenance strategies that will keep downtime of fusion power plants due to maintenance to a minimum. Our main research activities address technical aspects of manipulation of large payloads with slender robots that undergo considerable deformation.
The work on Control System Technologies within Remote Maintenance related to DEMO considers safe adaptive control of large structures such as breeder blankets during in-vessel maintenance. This work includes modelling and simulation of flexible mechanical structures, online parameter estimation, and motion control in tight spaces. A big emphasis is put on the safety of the system, as collisions during maintenance will be very costly.
The research on remote maintenance of fusion power plants builds on the strong robotics research at SDU Robotics that mainly addresses industrial robots, but also considers robots for large structures in Center for Large Structure Production.