Wendelstein Wiedersehen
Over the last few days, we got to revisit an old friend of ours. An internship we had taken back in 2022, which had been on our mind for a while now. I'm talking about the Wendelstein W7-x stellarator fusion experiment, for which we, during an eight month internship, had designed a wonderful board to help them out with a control issue!
For those not in the know, the Wendelstein is a fusion experiment located here in Germany, which is using the so-called "stellarator" configuration, an alternative to the Tokamak, to contain the plasma. This experiment in particular uses giant megawatt-range microwave beams to heat the plasma, at 1 MW per beam and ten of those. Now, as it turns out, doing so in plein air can be ... tricky, as said air occasionally will turn a little unhappy with such power densities and ... Well, Arc. Turn into a spicy little ball of hot, angry, plasma with a lot of desire to wreak havoc.
The board we designed sits at the very end of the beam path of this system and carefully monitors the power level coming out of the beam, tracking it, comparing it with expected values, and if something is amiss it sends a shutoff notification to the main controller of the respective beam. When we had left our internship back in 2022 it was just a prototype idea - functional, but we only had one running unit. We did get a very nice TimescaleDB article written for it, though~
Well, the years passed, we got busy with CERN and finishing our studies and whatnot... But we've always been wanting to revisit the old site. Not only is Greifswald incredibly beautiful as a city, and well worth a stop. but also just to... See what had become of our system. We finally took a little time to actually... Well, do so, and took a few days off work to stop by.
Now, three years later, all of the microwave beam generators have been outfitted with our units, and they even have someone working more permanently on these boards. To say that they were a success is putting it mildly - we were reassured that the whole operation of the Wendelstein relies, in a small part, on our system now!!
Look at 'em, ain't they just so cute <3
I'm damn proud of these things... Eight months of hard work and now look at them. And, if you, dear reader, think you can't do this? I do dare you to try! You'd be surprised what the right place can do. If you are still a student, absolutely go check out CERN's Technical Studentship programme, or look for a fun reserach centre and hit them up!
Reflections
The thing is ... This didn't come for free, mentally. This whole moving back and forth over the last few years has been rather ... Tiring, and hard. And the Wendelstein is part of that, so it has a weird position in this mind. Revising the area was surprisingly intense, actually. It felt overwhelming to go back to a place where you have so much unfinished history...
Things you never got to try out come back to you. Memories of habits, little café's and such you haven't visited in years but you still remember your favourite drink from them. It's oddly intense, in a distant kind of way. It's moments like that where you realize that you still haven't quite ... Left this place. Haven't quite processed the loss. I don't think we ever did, we had to jump off and go to the next place rather quickly. Gods, leaving CERN was even worse...
When you go through tough times, people often encourage you about the future. I don't see enough people also helping you grieve properly for the past, and move on from that. To remind us that taking a moment to reminisce is important and good, every now and then. You leave parts of yourself whereever you go, and pretending those parts aren't missing when you leave just makes you feel empty.
No, there will always be a bit of us at the Wendelstein. It'll always be missing a little bit ... But it's still there. We can visit it any time, and, more importantly, what we did is being cared for. It was nice to realize that, like a moment of continuation for a task we had thought was dead history.
We're working on completely different things now, mind you, but unlike the last few years we still have not quite managed to settle... In part I think it's because we needed a reminder that we did good so far, because until now it just felt like we ... "Did", and then had to move, and... Yeah. Well, it's nice that the things we did were good.
Now it's time to just keep doing that <3