University President Killeen Tours CPMI, HIDRA

University of Illinois President Timothy L. Killeen on Wednesday toured the Center for Plasma-Material Interactions laboratories, including CPMI’s crown jewel, the HIDRA plasma/fusion facility.

David Ruzic, CPMI Director and Abel Bliss Professor of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at Illinois, and NPRE Assistant Research Prof. Daniel Andruczyk, who directs HIDRA’s operations, led the tour of CPMI, located in the Nuclear Radiations Laboratory, 201 S. Goodwin Avenue. Ruzic and Andruczyk told Killeen of the recent U.S. Department of Energy $1.05 million grant that supports HIDRA’s use as a test bed for lithium technology in fusion reactors.

For several years, Ruzic and his research group have been working with molten lithium as a plasma-facing component (PFC) – the material exposed to plasma inside a fusion reactor’s walls. PFCs are needed for the reactor walls to withstand heat damage and hits from fast-moving particles within the plasma without injecting impurities into the plasma. The researchers believe technology developed using lithium may provide for economically feasible fusion reactors.

HIDRA, which stands for Hybrid Illinois Device for Research Applications, provides an in-house facility for lithium experiments.

Additionally, Ruzic showed Killeen experiments CPMI researchers conduct to improve and create equipment needed to sustain Moore's Law for computer chip production. The number of transistors on a given size chip doubles every two years because new ways are created to make the computer chips.

President Kileen thoroughly enjoyed his visit and had fun seeing researchers in action.

For more photos, see NPRE's Facebook Page.