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Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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Fusion Science and Technology
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Latest News
Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
Masami Ohnishi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 2 | Number 4 | October 1982 | Pages 609-616
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST82-A20801
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Since an ignited deuterium-tritium plasma of a moving ring compact torus reactor (MRCTR) is thermally unstable at the operating temperature, suppression of the thermal instability is an essential issue for maintaining the stationary burning of a plasma. The feedback stabilization by means of major radial compression-decompression is proposed for a burn control in an MRCTR. The compression-decompression is carried out through the regulation of the solenoidal magnetic field according to the deviation of the ion temperature from the equilibrium value. The dynamics of a plasma core with a feedback control is calculated in a zero-dimensional plasma model assuming the empirical confinement scalings obtained in the present tokamak experiments. The effects of ion density on the dynamics are also studied for two extreme cases of complete particle recycling and perfect pumping. The scheme is found to be effective for the burn control. The deviations of a major radius and a fusion output power are less than several percents of the equilibrium values during the control to suppress the temperature excursion. The rate of change in the magnetic field for the control is as slow as 500 G/s.
