Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Dr. Jon LaPook reports on the experimental treatment Platelet Rich Plasma therapy, a procedure that appears to help heal a muscle, tendon or joint injury without surgery

Research on the Alcator C-Mod experiment at MIT has made an unexpected connection between two seemingly unrelated but important phenomena observed in tokamak plasmas: spontaneous plasma rotation and the global energy confinement of the plasma.

Recent experiments carried out at the DIII-D tokamak in San Diego have allowed scientists to observe how fusion plasmas spontaneously turn off the plasma turbulence responsible for most of the heat loss in plasmas confined by toroidal magnetic fields. Using a new microwave instrument based on the same principles as police radar guns, researchers from UCLA observed the complex interplay between plasma turbulence and plasma flows occurring on the surface of tokamak plasmas.

A key challenge in producing fusion energy is confining the plasma long enough for the ionized hydrogen to fuse and produce net power.

A major upgrade to the DIII-D tokamak fusion reactor operated by General Atomics in San Diego will enable it to develop fusion plasmas that can burn indefinitely.

To achieve nuclear fusion for practical energy production, scientists often use magnetic fields to confine plasma. This creates a magnetic (or more precisely "magneto-hydrodynamic") fluid in which plasma is tied to magnetic field lines, and where regions of plasma can be isolated and heated to very high temperatures—typically 10 times hotter than the core of the sun! At these temperatures the plasma is nearly superconducting, and the magnetic field becomes tightly linked to the plasma, able to provide the strong force needed to hold in the hot fusion core. The overall plasma and magnetic field structure becomes akin to that of an onion, where magnetic field lines describe surfaces like the layers in the onion.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Heated to extreme temperatures of up to 150 million degrees Celsius, the plasma in ITER's giant experimental fusion reactor will be fed a fuel of frozen pellets of deuterium-tritium, fired into the tokamak vacuum vessel by pellet injectors. Testing of the most recent pellet injection design technology developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and US ITER is under way this fall at the DIII-D research tokamak in San Diego, operated by General Atomics for the Department of Energy through the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Inside the Plasma Spray-Physical Vapor Deposition, or PS-PVD, ceramic powder is introduced into the plasma flame, which vaporizes it and then condenses it to form the ceramic coating.