CPMI Goes to SOFE

June 8, 2015

CPMI was intensely involved in last week’s Symposium on Fusion Engineering (SOFE) held this year in Austin, Texas. Chaired by CPMI’s own Dr. Jean Paul Allain, SOFE is the prime fusion energy engineering conference. Professors Dr. Daniel Andruczyk and Dr. Davide Curreli started out the week by organizing and, along with CPMI Director Dr. David Ruzic, contributing to a short course on Plasma Material Interactions for Fusion Plasma Applications. Dr. Ruzic’s lecture for the short course was Plasma Facing Materials in Fusion. Dr. Andruczyk gave two lectures, titled Fundamentals of Plasma Material Interactions and Diagnostics for Plasma Material Interactions, while Dr. Curreli’s two lectures were titled The Plasma Sheath and Computational Plasma Material Interactions 1: Plasma Edge Models.

In addition to the short course, Dr. David Ruzic gave an invited talk titled Design of LiMIT Type Test Module as a Limiter. Dr. Andruczyk presented the status of and progress made on the Hybrid Illinois Device for Research Applications (HIDRA) and gave a second, invited talk on HIDRA and the Materials Challenges for Stellarators. Graduate students Matthew Szott and Peter Fiflis gave talks on wetting of nanostructured surfaces by liquid lithium and tin & the time-resolved observation of tungsten nanostructuring due to helium plasma respectively.

Felipe Bedoya and Anton Neff, two more graduate students, presented posters at the conference. Felipe’s poster was about the Materials Analysis Particle Probe (MAPP) upgrade and its integration into the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX-U) and Anton displayed a poster titled Defect Dynamics of Ultra-Refined Tungsten under Helium Bombardment. Also in attendance were CPMI postdoctoral research scientist Kishor Kalathiparambil and graduate students Mike Christenson and Jon Drobny.

Conferences such as SOFE are an essential and exciting part of CPMI’s role in participating in the global research community and continuing to conduct cutting edge science. In addition to the mutual exchange of knowledge and experience characteristic of every good scientific conference, CPMI’s involvement in the previous SOFE in 2013 led directly to our acquisition of HIDRA (formerly WEGA) – what will result from this year’s SOFE remains to be seen.

SOFE 2015