Bin Wang explores the promise and potential of fusion energy

Bin Wang

Wang, third from left, with graduate and postdoc students and OU faculty participating in the research group working to expand education in fusion technology.

If you ask Bin Wang about his most recent three-month-long business trip, he’d probably tell you that it was an essential step in building the engineering workforce of the future.

Wang serves as a member of a multi-institutional project team led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., on “Inertial Fusion Energy Science and Technology Accelerated Research for Fusion Innovation and Reactor Engineering Hub” or IFE STARFIRE.

“While that project name certainly sounds complicated, the goal is simple,” said Wang, who holds the Conoco/DuPont Professorship in Chemical Engineering and is a professor in the OU School of Sustainable Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering. “We hope to eventually produce limitless, carbon-free energy that is free of greenhouse gas emissions and long-term radioactive waste.”

The Conoco DuPont Professorship, funded in 1992 through a $250,000 gift to the OU Foundation from E.I. DuPont De Nemours and Co., is awarded to a professor with a national reputation for research excellence and superior teaching skills in chemical engineering.

Wang’s role as the OU faculty representative in Livermore was to observe day-to-day work on a project and begin developing curriculum materials and outreach activities related to fusion technology. “This is important, so we will know what tools we need to train next-generation engineers in this emerging opportunity,” he said.

OU is partnering to expand education in fusion technology with teams of public policy researchers and mechanical, environmental, chemical and electrical engineers. Additionally, physicists and materials experts representing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Texas A&M University; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of California, San Diego are involved. Teams from the University of Rochester, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Livermore Lab Foundation also contribute.

Wang explained that fusion, the energy source that powers the sun and stars, works by pressing isotopes of hydrogen atoms into each other at temperatures as high as 100 million degrees and pressures 100 billion times what we experience on earth. The process causes the hydrogen to combine into helium and releases enormous amounts of energy and heat. But unlike the nuclear fission process that powers today’s nuclear reactors, fusion energy doesn’t create long-term radioactive waste.

“Successful commercial development of fusion energy will be among history’s most profound changes. Fusion will offer a clean, sustainable baseload and safe energy source that will empower a transformational change from energy scarcity to abundance—enabling us to do things that have never been done before and overcoming enduring global grand challenges, like desalinating water and making sustainable transportation fuels,” said OU Vice President for Research and Partnerships Tomás Díaz de la Rubia. “We are thankful for Dr. Wang and his work on this program.”

Wang, who is completing his 10th year at OU, teaches four chemical engineering courses and credits his endowed professorship with providing him opportunities to pursue interests like the fusion project.

“It would be difficult for me to carry out my research without my endowed professorship,” he said. “Besides the obvious collaboration and research opportunities it provides, it also gives me the flexibility to identify and pursue future possibilities and challenges in my field—there's both promise and potential in engineering."