Short courses

Plasma Material Interactions for Fusion Plasmas: Fundamentals and Applications

Course description

As part of SOFE 2023, a special one–day mini course on Plasma Material Interactions for Fusion Plasmas: Fundamentals and Applications will be offered on Sunday July 09, 2023. The mini course will be held at the Oxford Examinations School, Oxford, United Kingdom. International experts from academia and national labs will provide a set of comprehensive lectures on plasma material interactions, plasma edge physics and their applications in fusion. 

The aim of the mini course is to provide a comprehensive introduction of plasma-material interactions with an emphasis on fusion plasmas. This mini course will address rising interest in the area of plasma material interaction and will in part introduce the breadth and depth of the subject including: plasma surface interactions in fusion edge plasmas, plasma diagnostics for PMI and modeling of the plasma edge and materials, where the plasma/material interface plays a crucial role in materials performance and behavior. A unique aspect of this mini course is to bring instructors who not only have an expertise in plasma-material interactions, but also extensive experience both in PMI experiments and atomistic/multi-scale computational PMI modeling. The course will uniquely describe the challenges of PMI experiments and computational modeling and the areas in which these two thrusts can complement each other. The course instructors include leading researchers in the areas of experimental and computational plasma-material interactions. 

A unique aspect of this mini course is to bring instructors who not only have an expertise in plasma-material interactions, but also extensive experience both in PMI experiments and atomistic/multi-scale computational PMI modeling. The course will uniquely describe the challenges of PMI experiments and computational modeling and the areas in which these two thrusts can complement each other. Topics include: PMI fundamentals, the plasma sheath, plasma facing components, PMI diagnostics, computational PMI, PMI of the divertor, PMI of the SOL and pedestal. The course instructors include leading researchers in the areas of experimental and computational plasma-material interactions.

lecturers

• Rajesh Maingi (PPPL)
• David Donovan (UTK) 
• Andrei Khodak (PPPL)
• Davide Curreli (UIUC)
• Daniel Andruczyk (UIUC) 

Biographies

Rajesh Maingi

Research Areas
Tokamak confinement and boundary physics; plasma-material interactions; liquid metal plasma-facing components

Bio
Rajesh Maingi is Head of the Tokamak Experimental Sciences Department at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), and the lead investigator on a domestic liquid metal plasma-facing component development program. He has published research on the boundary plasma in many fusion devices, including Alcator C-Mod (Boston), ASDEX-Upgrade (Germany), DIII-D (San Diego), EAST (China), KSTAR (S. Korea), MAST (England), NSTX (Princeton), and TdeV (Canada), in 35 first author journal articles and more than 900 total publications. He was elected a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society in 2019, a Distinguished Research Fellow at PPPL in 2014, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2009. In 2018 he received the Princeton University/PPPL Kaul Foundation Prize for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research and Technology Development. He received his Ph. D. in Nuclear Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1992. Following postdoctoral fellowships at the DIII-D device, he served on the research staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1997-2012, and joined PPPL as a Principal Research Physicist in 2012.

Education
Ph.D., Nuclear Engineering – North Carolina State University
B.S., Nuclear Engineering – North Carolina State University

Social

Linkedin

ORCID 0000-0003-1238-8121

Professor David Donovan

Bio
David Donovan is an associate professor and a Zinkle Faculty Fellow in the Nuclear Engineering Department at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK). He received his PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011 and his BS in Nuclear Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  His PhD work was in the area of Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) Fusion for the purpose of creating and utilizing small-scale neutron generating devices to detect explosives and other illicit materials.  He was a post-doctoral research associate at Sandia National Laboratories-Livermore where he worked in the area of plasma-surface interactions in magnetically confined fusion devices.  He collaborated extensively with the DIII-D tokamak operated by General Atomics in San Diego, CA as well as with the Tritium Plasma Experiment located at Idaho National Laboratory. Since joining UTK in 2014, he has developed a research program in fusion energy science, plasma physics, plasma-material interactions, and near term applications of nuclear fusion devices. He has introduced new plasma/fusion undergraduate and graduate courses including Introduction to Plasma Physics, Introduction to Fusion Technology, Plasma Diagnostics, and Boundary Plasma Physics. His group has constructed a compact electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) plasma exposure stage at UTK for low flux ion damage studies, which has been combined with material characterization tools (SEM, FIB, EBSD, GIXRD) to perform studies of He ion damage to tungsten. His research group has performed plasma and heat flux diagnostic implementation on the Proto-MPEX linear plasma device at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and performed surface chemistry studies at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) on the LTX-Beta device. Prof. Donovan leads a collaborative research effort with the Boundary Plasma Science program at the DIII-D fusion experiment at General Atomics in the area of diagnostic development, boundary plasma experiments, and impurity transport studies. Prof. Donovan is also part of an international collaboration with the WEST fusion experiment in Cadarache, France, which is studying the use of tungsten plasma-facing components in a long-pulse magnetically confined fusion device.

Andrei KHodak

Research Areas
Liquid metal plasma-facing components, tritium breeding blankets, computational fluid dynamics, magnetohydrodynamics; plasma-material interactions, 

Bio
Andrei Khodak is Principal Engineering Analyst at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) where he performs multi-physics modeling including plasma simulation, magneto-hydrodynamics, computational fluid dynamics, turbulence modelling, heat, and mass transfer. He worked on analysis and engineering of many existing and future fusion devices, including ITER, DIII-D (San Diego), CFETR (China), NSTX (Princeton). He received the M.Sc. degree in engineering physics and the Ph.D. degree in physics and mathematics from the St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University, Russia, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. Since then, he held various research and engineering positions in industry and academia, all related to fluid mechanics and heat transfer before joining PPPL in 2010.

Education
Ph.D., Physics and Mathematics – St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University
B.S., Engineering Physics – St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University

Social

Linkedin www.linkedin.com/in/andreikhodak

ORCID  0000-0002-8273-6614

Davide Curreli 

Research Areas
Computational Modeling of Plasma-Material Interactions, Plasma Boundary, Plasma Transport, Plasma Chemistry  

Bio
Davide Curreli is Associate Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Dr Curreli leads the Laboratory of Computational Plasma Physics at Illinois. His research activities focus on computational modeling of plasma material interactions and plasma chemistry of low-temperature plasmas for fusion and nuclear applications. Among his current research activities, Dr Curreli is coordinator of the Nuclear Fireball Plasma Chemistry activities within the University Research Alliance funded by DoD DTRA. His group actively works on multiple projects in Fusion Energy Sciences. Dr Curreli is Donald Biggar Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois. He received a BS (2004), MS (2007), and PhD (2011) from the University of Padova, Italy. He joined the University of Illinois in 2012. 

Social

Webpage: https://npre.illinois.edu/people/profile/dcurreli 

ORCID  0000-0001-6406-6699

Daniel Andruczyk

Research Areas
Plasma Material Interactions, Plasma Facing Component Materials, Liquid Lithium Plasma Facing Technology, Plasma Edge, Diagnostics

Bio
Prof. Andruczyk is heading up the HIDRA device at the University of Illinois. Previously he was a Research Engineer at the Princeton Plasma Physics Labs from 2012 – 2014. He currently is an Research Associate Professor at the Center for Plasma-Material Interactions, a multidisciplinary center at the University of Illinois. Prof. Andruczyk conducts research into plasma edge studies and PFC materials as well as research related to manufacturing in the semiconductor industry. Prof. Andruczyk has previously worked as a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Greifswald where the W-7X Stellarator is located. Professor Andruczyk has extensive experience running experiments on H-1, WEGA, HIDRA (Formerly WEGA), NSTX and EAST. In conjunction with PPPL, ORNL and Illinois, Prof Andrucyk is one of the lead PI’s in the Liquid Metal PFC development program in the US.

Education
Ph.D., Plasma Physics – University of Sydney
M.S., Plasma Physics – University of Sydney
B.S (Hons)., Laser Physics – University of Queensland
B.S., Physics – University of Queensland

Social

LinkedIn

ORCID  0000-0001-6613-3509