Ayesa will be the engineering support company for IFMIF-DONES, Spain's largest scientific infrastructure.

Ayesa will be the support engineering firm for IFMIF-DONES, a strategic facility within the European fusion energy program, where the materials used in these future power plants will be tested, validated, and qualified.

The IFMIF-DONES Spain consortium has awarded the contract for "Engineering Support Services for the Construction Phase of the Scientific and Technological Infrastructure" to the joint venture led by Ayesa and formed with UG21.

This step is key to the development of IFMIF-DONES, which will be built at the Industrial, Technological and Research Area (CITAI) in the municipality of Escúzar (Granada). It will feature a high-intensity 40 MeV deuteron linear accelerator, expandable to two parallel accelerators.

IFMIF-DONES will be the laboratory responsible for qualifying materials for use in future fusion reactors, such as DEMO, providing essential data on their behavior under irradiation conditions similar to those of a fusion reactor. The ultimate goal is to generate electricity through magnetic confinement fusion, replicating the energy of the sun on Earth.

With a planned investment of €700 million for its construction, €50 million for its launch, and €60 million annually for its operation, IFMIF-DONES is positioned as the largest scientific project developed in Spain.

José Antonio García Bermudo, manager of the joint venture and Global Division Director of Energy and Industrial Facilities at Ayesa, emphasizes that "it's a challenge for a top-level engineering firm like Ayesa, which encompasses all the disciplines and sections required for a next-generation nuclear facility."

These include specific scientific and technological engineering (neutrino flare irradiation systems, liquid lithium circuits, particle accelerators), rapid-response control systems, and laboratory automation; comprehensive management of all projects and systems, quality assurance, laboratory construction engineering, logistics, and system maintenance; radiation protection elements; and remote manipulation systems in irradiated spaces.

To this end, the UTE's technical team will collaborate with organizations and companies with international experience, such as the Plasma Physics and Fusion Technology Laboratory at the University of Seville; QuantIA, a spin-off from the University of Granada; GTD Science, Infrastructure & Robotics; and AMPHOS21 Consulting.

Ayesa is participating in another research project, additional to the engineering contract, called OPTIMA-DONES. The objective of this project is to develop a cyber-physical monitoring and proactive maintenance system for IFMIF-DONES' critical systems, aligned with the Maintenance 5.0 paradigm.

In this case, Ayesa assumes management leadership and will also play a key technical role in research to create a cyber-digital twin of the infrastructure, as well as software processes and real-time data acquisition.

To this end, it is working on AI models and an interface for visualizing and simulating cybernetic system states and processes, together with various research groups from the universities of Malaga and Granada.