The Paihau–Robinson Research Institute is Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington's applied physics and engineering institute, based at the Gracefield Innovation Quarter in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, and specialising in 📝high-temperature superconductors, magnet technology and materials.
The institute is named for the engineer Bill Robinson; "Paihau" is a traditional Māori splice used to strengthen voyaging waka. Its work spans 📝superconductor characterisation, magnet design, satellite propulsion and materials science, and within 📝fusion it has concentrated on the problem of catching a 📝quench in an HTS magnet. HTS quenches propagate slowly and generate little voltage before damage, and a 📝tokamak's electromagnetic environment is hostile to the voltage taps conventionally used to detect them. The institute's answer is distributed fibre-optic thermometry: fibre Bragg gratings, and ultra-long fibre Bragg grating arrays that read temperature quasi-continuously along a conductor rather than at discrete points.
That approach was tested on hardware. Two 📝VIPER cables instrumented with FBG and ULFBG fibres were driven into heater-induced quench-like events at the 📝SULTAN facility at EPFL's 📝Swiss Plasma Center in Villigen, Switzerland; the fibres resolved single-digit temperature excursions with signal-to-noise ratios between 4 and 32, with response times from effectively instantaneous to a few seconds depending on operating temperature (Superconductor Science and Technology 34, 2021). Strain sensitivity dominated thermal sensitivity in the conditions SULTAN could reach, which set the follow-on agenda. Subsequent papers written jointly with CFS staff addressed radiation: gamma irradiation of Ge-doped and radiation-hard silica fibres at cryogenic temperature with 1550 and 970 nm photobleaching (Journal of Applied Physics, 2023), optical annealing to reduce radiation-induced attenuation (IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity, 2024), and localised hotspot detection using distributed FBGs (Journal of Lightwave Technology, 2023).