11/7/2025
NPRE researchers play a central role in $220M grants from the U.S. Department of Energy to accelerate the commercial use of fusion energy.
Closing a star in a bottle
“If you're going to take a star and close that star inside a bottle, you have to make sure that you do a good job in designing the walls of the bottle.”
Professor Davide Curreli
Davide Curreli, Professor and Donald Biggar Willett Faculty Scholar of Nuclear, Plasma & Radiological Engineering (NPRE) in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Primary Investigator Research Associate Professor Daniel Andruczyk and other NPRE Illinois researchers are designing such packaging for nuclear fusion – the same energy that powers stars’ cores – as part of several collaborations to accelerate the viability of commercial fusion energy funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
The federal government is committed to connecting basic scientific research with the growing nuclear fusion industry. Accelerating the viability of economical fusion energy production is seen as central to national security and energy independence. Andruczyck says that "they recognise that nuclear energy fusion and fusion in the future are going to play an extremely important role in providing energy security."
“A significant step forward in advancing fusion energy research”
The DOE announced an anticipated investment of up to $235M in thirteen Fusion Innovative Research Engine (FIRE) “centrally managed teams called ‘Collaboratives’ that have a collective goal of bridging basic science research programs with the needs of the growing fusion industry.” Phase 1 launched in January 2025, while Phase 2 was announced last month. Each team is comprised of researchers from universities, national laboratories and private enterprises. Each collaborative’s work will span four years.
NPRE faculty will play a vital role in a number of these projects, developing new materials for fusion energy.
“Plasma Material Interactions (PMI) has been recognized as one of the major problems to tackle and solve in fusion energy by the National Academy of Engineering,” Curreli said. “And the expertise at Illinois — and I think this is recognized across the entire fusion community — is specifically in PMI. We have demonstrated a capability over the past ten-plus years. Our contribution on multiple fronts will be on the plasma material interactions.”
NPRE researchers lead the way in fusion energy materials
Describing his departmental colleagues, Curreli mentions that assistant professor April Novak is working “on liquid-metal blankets and fluid dynamics simulations which might be useful for both fusion and fission.” He also namechecks NPRE Assistant Professor Lorenzo Vergari and his work on advanced blankets and coolants, and Associate Head for Graduate Programs and Donald Biggar Willett Professor R. Mohan Sankaran and his research on low-temperature plasma. John Paul Allain, Associate Director of the DOE Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Illinois Grainger Engineering and taught at NPRE for ten years. Professor Emeritus David Ruzic notes that Allain wrote his thesis under Ruzic and co-authored papers on lithium for fusion.
“I'm really happy to see that the Department of Energy has recognized that by providing funding in this area, which I think can make all the difference in the world to making commercial fusion energy possible.”
Professor Emeritus David Ruzic
Illinois researchers are contributing to FIRE collaboratives
As part of the first round of DOE FIRE grants, totaling $107M, Curreli was awarded a FIRE grant in collaboration with Darin Ernst from MIT for the creation of an advanced simulation center focused on profile prediction in fusion pilot plants. The project was titled "FIRE Collaborative: Advanced Profile Prediction for Fusion Pilot Plant Design” (APP-FPP).
Curreli writes that “the urgently needed capability provided by APP-FPP helps bridge the gap between decades of federally funded research, which has aimed to develop validated predictive scientific understanding of turbulence and transport in fusion plasmas, and the Bold Decadal Vision for fusion, which will support industry in designing and building the next generation of fusion devices through public-private partnerships. AFP-FPP is delivering this new predictive capability in a highly accelerated simulation framework, making whole device profile prediction accessible and practical for end users in the fusion industry to optimize fusion pilot plant designs.”
On September 10, 2025, DOE announced an additional $128 million in funding for FIRE collaboratives. Of the seven teams selected, NPRE researchers are involved in three of them.
Benjamin Lindley, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Argonne National Laboratory, is leading the FIRE Collaborative: Fusion Neutrons for Integrated Blanket Technology Development Through Advanced Testing and Design.
Assistant Professor April Novak at Illinois will lead the validation of liquid-metal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) tools for modeling breeder blankets, in tandem with new high-magnetic-field experiments at the Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror (WHAM) facility. The team will also generate a pressure drop library for common fusion flow components compatible with fast-running design tools. The overall goal is to improve the maturity of simulation and design tools for breeder blankets.
Nathaniel Ferraro from Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL) is leading the FIRE Collaborative: Mitigating Risks from Abrupt Confinement Loss (MiRACL), to study what happens when the plasma’s energy suddenly escapes the confining magnetic field that keeps it away from the walls of the fusion system. MiRACL will partner with the industry to identify and manage associated risks. Curreli is contributing to the collaborative project on the determination of material limits due to cumulative PMI.
“We have developed ion surface interaction codes,” Curreli says, “ these are sophisticated kinetic tools that handle the PMI problem using advanced computing. Now we are integrating these tools into larger frameworks by using machine learning. Thanks to machine learning, you can retain kinetic accuracy, which would normally require high-performance computing, within larger computational framework, and get results in the blink of an eye in terms of performance.”
The project, entitled “FIRE Collaborative: Advancing the maturity of liquid metal (LM) plasma facing materials and first wall concepts”, led by Rajesh Maingi from PPPL, aims to address key technical challenges associated with liquid metal plasma-facing materials and wall concepts, thereby enabling the consideration of liquid metals for fusion pilot plant designs. Research will encompass four main challenges: testing protective materials, understanding material properties, investigating the behavior of liquid metals in magnetic fields, and developing new metal alloys.
NPRE expertise in liquid metal technology
Daniel Andruczyk, NPRE Research Associate Professor, is heading up the University of Illinois portion of the "Advancing Liquid Metal Plasma-Facing Material" FIRE collaborative. The co-PIs on this collaboration from NPRE are Curreli and Ruzic. Aside from PPPL, the Illinois team is receiving the next-largest share of the budget, totaling $4.24M over the next four years.
The team includes researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, MIT, Pennsylvania State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and ExoFusion (a spin-out from the University of Texas at Austin).
As Andruczyk describes it, “The FIRE collaborative looks to advance the maturity of liquid metal (LM) plasma-facing materials (PFM) and first wall component (PFC) concepts.” He says the collaborative role of Illinois researchers will be to drive much of the experimental work with lithium. "There are nine of us overall in this collaborative, pulling a lot of experience that we've developed together to push not just liquid metals, but liquid lithium as a solution for fusion reactors."
Curreli defines his contributions as “the computational modeling of liquid metals and what happens to the surface of a liquid when it's exposed to a plasma.”
Andruczyk elaborates that "through many discussions with the public and private sector, 60 gaps were identified, with about ten that were highlighted by many end users. Thus, there are four interconnected areas that will be focused on by the Collaborative: Integrated PFC analysis and testing of liquid lithium, Material properties and lithium compatibility, Liquid lithium flow in magnetic fields, and Development of novel liquid metal alloys. Illinois will be heavily involved in several of the areas, as our unique facilities, including our own steady-state magnetic toroidal fusion device, HIDRA, will be used to advance novel PFC technology solutions."
“We are the premier laboratory, I'd say in the world, that works on molten lithium or molten metals. We have demonstrated the safety of this to the university, we've developed the right types of procedures that keep things safe and working, and we do more liquid metal experimental research than anywhere. So, a lot of times we are included in other teams because of our development of the liquid metal technology.”
Professor Emeritus David Ruzic
As Ruzic and his collaborators wrote in the 2021 paper Lithium, a path to make fusion energy affordable, a “lithium-driven low recycling regime could accelerate fusion's commercial viability since such a device would be smaller, dramatically decreasing plant and electricity costs if all technological complexities are solved.”
Photo Credit: Virgil Ward, Grainger Engineering
The Center for Plasma Material Interactions (CPMI), located in NPRE, is one of the world’s leading laboratories for liquid lithium and metals and has advanced much of the knowledge and technology related to flowing lithium and its interactions with plasmas.
"The whole point of these five collaboratives is to work with industry. To help answer a lot of the questions that they have about various technologies. It's not just about doing research, it's about pushing for that public private partnership. That means that our collaborative needs to have some agility."
Research Associate Professor Daniel Andruczyk
Partnerships to commercialize fusion energy
A key component of the FIRE collaboratives is a public-private partnership with firms working to commercialize fusion energy. Curreli calls fusion energy generation “a high-risk, high-reward type of investment. There are a few companies that are doing excellent work,” he says, mentioning Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a MIT spinoff. Illinois Grainger Engineering has partnered with Tokamak Energy, a British company serving as a technical advisor on eight FIRE projects. In 2024, Tokamak began working with Illinois Grainger engineers to design an upgrade to the HIDRA and to apply research findings to its prototype power plant designs.
Andruczyk says, "I've noticed DOE has really, in some ways, been pioneering this public-private partnership in terms of private companies having a real input into where the research goes. This push by the US to become the leader in how all this is done is pretty big."
As Ruzic puts it, “we’re very well placed to do this kind of research.”
Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Daniel Andruczyk is an Illinois Grainger Engineering research associate professor of nuclear, plasma & radiological engineering and is affiliated with the Center for Plasma Material Interactions.
Davide Curreli is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of nuclear, plasma & radiological engineering and is affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Davide Curreli is a Donald Biggar Willett Faculty Scholar.
April Novak is an Illinois Grainger Engineering assistant professor of nuclear, plasma & radiological engineering affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
David Ruzic is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor emeritus of nuclear, plasma & radiological engineering and director of the Illinois Plasma Institute and Center for Plasma Materials Interactions. He is affiliated with the University of Illinois Carle College of Medicine and Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory and is Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering.
R. Mohan Sankaran is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of nuclear, plasma & radiological engineering, and is affiliated with the SPEC Lab. R. Mohan Sankaran is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor.
Lorenzo Vergari is an Illinois Grainger assistant professor of nuclear, plasma & radiological engineering.