Here are some cool pictures/videos to accompany some explanations of our ongoing projects and their motivations:

Tungsten alloys as Fusion Plasma-Facing Component (PFC) materials:

Tungsten has an extremely high melting point and good structural strength, lending itself nicely to extreme environments such as a fusion reactor. However, bombardment of tungsten by high energy neutrons and photons chips away at the Tungsten, producing “fuzz” and leaving behind damage that impacts the material’s lifetime and strength. This footage shows ablation (surface blasting-away) of a tungsten sample using a high-powered laser, which can then be analyzed to characterize the damage and how to mitigate it.

 

Cold Atmospheric Plasmas:

Room temperature, atmospheric (sometimes called “dusty”) plasmas have a wide variety of exciting applications, and in this case are useful in sterilization of medical equipment, among many other possibilities.

 

Hot Hydrogen Testing of materials for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) systems:

Nuclear Thermal Rockets (NTRs) offer a significant increase in efficiency and decreased travel times for deep space missions, and are of renewed interest to NASA for their planning missions to the Moon and Mars. In order to get the technology ready for launch, significant testing must be done on all components to ensure they can within damage from hydrogen propellant at thousands of degrees. The following tube furnace is being utilized, in conjunction with the Materials Research Institute, to hold NTP material samples at 1673 K for hundreds of hours as an initial assessment of endurance in the hot, corrosive hydrogen environment.