Prof. Prabhat Ranjan CEO and Co-founder of a nuclear fusion company called ASPL Fusion. He is former Vice Chancellor of D Y Patil International University, Akurdi, Pune
To test my model, I have to become an experimentalist and there was no turning back! Of course, modeling activity continued too!
This long blog describes my successful foray into experiments to prove my model and my insistence on using only components available in the local market. It led to a unique development, improvement of machine to international standards and publication in top rated journal in spite of efforts made by colleagues to put barriers!
Continue reading “How I became an “Accidental Experimentalist” !”
During 1995-96, while trying to run ADITYA Tokamak (Nuclear Fusion Reactor), we used to find that nearly 80% of the discharges fail to go through. This
was due to the fact that power supply control system used to stop the discharge due to some malfunctions. ADITYA power supply system was controlled by a PDP-11 computer. It was popularly believed that software in the computer has some problems due to which the control system was malfunctioning. This was frustrating as lot of effort went into running the machine but there was very little output.
(For those, not aware, Tokamak is a device used to confine very high temperature plasma to produce energy using controlled nuclear fusion. As of now these are not in commercial use but at research stage. But we are getting close, like we have been saying for last 60 years !!!)
When SINP Tokamak installation was going on, Japanese Engineers from Toshiba came to install the machine as it was manufactured by Toshiba in Japan.
Continue reading “How Japanese got hooked on to Indian technology!”
