Featured Projects:
Special Projects

In order to get undergraduate and even high school students interested in plasma science, the CPMI often gives tours to highlight our research projects. As part of these tours, plasma demonstrations are shown so that students get a better understanding of the power of plasma!  

LAPCAP-Laser Assisted Plasma Coating at Atmospheric Pressure

The basic principle of Laser Assisted Plasma Coating at Atmospheric Pressure (LAPCAP) is to utilize a pulsed ND:YAG laser (t= 5~10 ns, with the intensity of 10^10~10^11 W/cm^2) to knock the atomic particles from the target and feed into the inductively coupled low temperature RF or microwave atmopheric plasma to further increase the efficiency of [...]

DEVeX – Divertor Edge and Vapor shielding eXperiment

Laboratory Investigation of Target Erosion by Energetic Plasma Flow S. Junga*, V. Surlaa, T. K. Grayb,c and D. N. Ruzica aCenter for Plasma-Material Interactions, Department of Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL 61801, USA bOak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, Oak Ridge TN USA cOak Ridge National Laboratory, [...]

IIAX – The Ion-surface InterAction eXperiment

IIAX bombards surfaces with a low-energy ion beam and monitors the material’s response to quantify its physical properties. Much of the research done in IIAX has focused plasma-wall interactions based on the NSTX experiment. Such work has had important implications for various types of plasma facing components. The materials applied in such research include ATJ [...]

SLIP – Study of Lithium Infusion in Porous media

Innovative materials are created every year as candidates for fusion first-walls and the like. One such material is a porous molybdenum foam specifically proposed to hold a volume of liquid lithium within a fusion experiment. The SLIP experiment was created to examine the wetting behavior of this foam. Its follow-up experiment, SLIP2X, is a plasma [...]

Solid/Liquid Lithium Divertor Experiment (SLiDE)

The SLiDE experiment is designed to study surface tension driven flows in fusion relevant magnetic fields and conditions. With the conclusion of the liquid lithium helium retention experiments at UIUC, a new experiment is being planned to study new effects which may impact divertor and limiter designs of future fusion devices. The CDX-U experiment at [...]

Surface Plasma Arcs by Radiofrequency – Control Study (SPARCS)

One plentiful source of energy is thermonuclear fusion, which is the same source of energy that our sun has been using for billions of years. To achieve nuclear fusion we need to heat and confine Deuterium and Tritium atoms (heavy hydrogen) so that they can overcome the repulsive Coulomb forces. Plasmas have to be generated [...]