14 Jan 2011
A competition was held for students to showcase their research on the theme of 'Advances in Low and No Carbon Energy Technologies' at Huddersfield University on 10 November 2010. The posters were submitted by students from the Universities of Huddersfield, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield and were judged by a panel chosen from science and industry over a glass of wine and scrumptious cake.
The posters contained research themes such as 'Green Transesterification Catalysis for Biodiesels', 'Molten Metal Biomass Gasification to produce an ammonia precursor gas' and new techniques in microwave assisted calcination for biodiesel production, to mention but a few of the high quality posters that were submitted. The winner for the poster with the best commercial potential was awarded to Sam Tygier and Roger Barlow from the University of Manchester and Cockroft Institute, for their poster on Accelerator Driven Subcritical Reactors (ADSR).
The research advances an idea proposed by Carlo Rubbia in 1993 of an Energy Amplifier model for a nuclear fission reaction. The poster research considers the fission process, using thorium as a fuel, being driven by an external neutron source generated by a proton beam hitting a spallation target.
The research focuses on the non-scaling Fixed Field Alternating Gradient Accelerator (FFAG), which combines the features of a cyclotron and synchrotron using only linear quadruple magnets. Work is still continuing in designing a FFAG to accelerate a 10mA beam.
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