CPMI and NPRE Research Associate Professor Daniel Andruczyk and his former student Rabel Rizkallah published a paper this month in the Journal of Fusion Energy. The title of the paper is “Rapid Vapor-Driven Plasma Contamination and Suppressed Net Lithium Surface Loss in the HIDRA Stellarator” and looks at a phenomenon with liquid metal walls in fusion reactors called vapor shielding. This is one potential way to protect the underlying surface and reduce the amount of heat flux that hits it. This paper shows the first evidence of vapor shielding in HIDRA and a toroidal reactor. Before that it has been observed in laboratory and linear devices such as at DIFFER in the Netherlands. Rable currently is currently at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and works on the DIII-D device.
The reference for the article is Rabel Rizkallah et al., Journal of Fusion Energy (2026) 45:39, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10894-026-00582-y