Scientists Say Secret to Fusion May Lie in Hellmann's Mayonnaise

Could the secret to practical fusion power lie in this delicious condiment?

Mayo Madness

Beyond being a delicious addition to a sandwich, mayonnaise may help scientists figure out how to harness the power of nuclear fusion.

Mechanical engineers at Pennsylvania's Lehigh University are, per a press release, using Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise — yes, they specified the brand — as a stand-in for plasma, the highly-charged state of matter that occurs when electrons are shed during the collision of atoms.

Neither solid, liquid, nor gas, plasma is believed to hold the key to fusion power, which despite various steps forward remains impractical for generating power at scale.

Arindam Banerjee, the mechanical engineer who led this experiment at Lehigh, and his team are experts in what's known as inertial confinement fusion. This discipline aims to heat small capsules filled with fuel (in this case, hydrogen isotopes) to Sun-like extreme temperatures, which then melt and become plasma.

Fused and Enthused

As one might expect, melting down hydrogen can create some wildly unstable conditions. To simulate the process, Banerjee and his team decided to use mayo, which as the scientist noted "behaves like a solid, but when subjected to a pressure gradient, it starts to flow."

One needn't subject Hellmann's to Sun-like temperatures or pressures to get it to melt, either. Instead, the mechanical engineer and his colleagues built what they called the Turbulent Mixing Laboratory, a huge contraption that whipped the condiment rapidly until it entered a plasma-like state.

"As with a traditional molten metal, if you put a stress on mayonnaise, it will start to deform, but if you remove the stress, it goes back to its original shape," Banerjee explained in the press release. "So there's an elastic phase followed by a stable plastic phase. The next phase is when it starts flowing, and that's where the instability kicks in."

Obviously, rapidly-spun mayonnaise isn't the same thing as plasma. But the scientists behind this new research, published in the journal Physical Review E, hope that they can scale up the findings by orders of magnitude and try to translate it when trying to achieve fusion.

"We're another cog in this giant wheel of researchers," Banerjee said. "And we're all working towards making inertial fusion cheaper and therefore, attainable."

 

More on fusion: MIT Claims Superconducting Breakthrough Means Fusion Power Can Be Practical