The design builds on existing technology and creates a magnetic field within a closed space to hold plasma in place long enough for fusion to occur allowing the hot plasma to react and burn.
The reactor itself would be largely self-sustaining meaning it would continuously heat the plasma to maintain thermonuclear conditions.
The new design is known as a spheromak meaning it generates the majority of magnetic fields by driving electrical currents into the plasma itself.
The researchers have tested successfully the prototype s ability to sustain a plasma efficiently and as they further develop
and expand the size of the device they can ramp up to higher-temperature plasma and get significant fusion power output.
When associate professor Qi Hua Fan of the electrical engineering and computer science department set out to make a less expensive supercapacitor for storing renewable energy he developed a new plasma technology that will streamline the production of display screens.
and plasma technologies Fan was named researcher of the year for the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering.
Through this project Fan developed a faster way of treating the biochar particles using a new technology called plasma activation.
Treating means you use plasma to change the material surface such as creating pores Fan said.
The plasma treatment activates the biochar in five minutes and at room temperature Fan explained. Conventional chemical activation takes several hours to complete
Plasma processing is a very critical technology in modern optoelectronic materials and devices Fan explained.
The high-energy plasma can deposit highly transparent and conductive thin films create high quality semiconductors and pattern micro-or nanoscale devices thus making the display images brighter and clearer.
Fan will work with Wintek to develop a prototype plasma system. The activation method has the potential to improve production efficiency saving time and energy he noted d
Then the team exposed the graphene to an oxygen plasma that knocked carbon atoms out of the graphene's nanoscale chicken wire lattice to create pores.
The longer the graphene membrane was exposed to the plasma, the bigger the pores that formed,
So far, the oxygen plasma approach worked the best, "he added. He worries more about gremlins that plague today's reverse osmosis membranes--growths on membrane surfaces that clog them (called"biofouling)
Despite the fact that all the treatments produced similar plasma OT increases compared with placebo, there was a main effect of treatment on anger ratings of emotionally ambiguous faces.
A laser-driven plasma wave accelerates and wiggles electrons, giving rise to a brilliant kev X-ray emission. his so-called betatron radiation is emitted in a collimated beam with excellent spatial coherence and remarkable spectral stability.
First, the laser pulse ploughs through a plasma consisting of positively charged atomic cores and their electrons like a ship through water, producing a wake of oscillating electrons.
The challenge is to contain the hot plasma and keep it stable; the fusion reactors of today,
California, said in early August that it has succeeded in keeping a high-energy plasma stable for five millisecondsuch less than the blink of an eye,
that fires two clouds of plasma at each other to form a ring of plasma. The magnetic field that holds the ring together is generated by the plasma itself technique known as a field-reversed configuration.
The plasma is sustained by the injection of high-energy particles from accelerators. The challenge for Tri Alpha design, says Binderbauer,
is ot enough and long enough? keeping the plasma stable at a high-enough temperature to achieve energy-positive fusion.
The recent experiment indicated that the companyhich has attracted millions of dollars in funding from investors including Goldman sachs and Vulcan Inc,
Making the plasma hot enough is the next key challenge. Next year, Tri Alpha will begin building a new
At MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, a group headed by Dennis Whyte a professor of nuclear science and engineering and the center director, published a conceptual design in July for a machine called the ARC reactor (ffordable, robust, compact.
The novelty of the ARC design is the nature of the electromagnets that confine the plasma.
The researchers also envision a liquid lanketsurrounding the plasma that will absorb neutrons without damage
Increasing the amplitude of the surrounding magnetic field raises the amount of fusion power produced in the plasma to the fourth power dramatic increase that could lead to a commercial prototype in a matter of years,
Jonathan Menard, a plasma physicist at the Princeton Plasma physics Laboratory, directs the National Spherical Torus Experiment,
< Back - Next >
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011