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Plasma

Physics Capstone Projects

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Improving The Efficiency Of The Preconditioning Of Iterative Solutions To The Kinetic Equation, D. Caleb Price May 2022

Improving The Efficiency Of The Preconditioning Of Iterative Solutions To The Kinetic Equation, D. Caleb Price

Physics Capstone Projects

To achieve the reality of fusion, a greater understanding of plasma is required. The kinetic equation can be evolved simultaneously alongside the fluid equations to solve for kinetic closures. NIMROD performs this with numerical solvers where the General Minimum Residual (GMRES) solver becomes more efficient with a preconditioning matrix as input. Using a GPU-enabled library, the efficiency of GPU offloading to the preconditioning step was tested. A significant decrease in the factoring time of preconditioning matrix was observed. This suggests that the allocation of GPUs is worth investigating for NIMROD’s own benefit, but also anyone seeking to improve the efficiency …


Electrically Induced Plasma, Nate Ashby Nov 2015

Electrically Induced Plasma, Nate Ashby

Physics Capstone Projects

My research project, under the mentorship of research professor Ajay Singh was to prove that the plasma he was creating was lasting longer than the electrical current data indicated. He decided that if the plasma was still there, it would be producing light. So we set out to prove that the light emitted from his plasma lasted longer than the current draw measurements.


Langmuir Probes In A Microwave Generated Plasma, Wesley Rawlins Apr 2015

Langmuir Probes In A Microwave Generated Plasma, Wesley Rawlins

Physics Capstone Projects

In this work, we considered a microwave generated plasma, in a toroidal device. In this set up, we tend to meet the conditions for several known plasma instabilities. Not all the gas in the chamber was ionized. Using a Langmuir probe we were able to determine the population temperature and the plasma density in the chamber. The existence of a plasma was determined by measuring the strength of reflected microwaves. We varied the fill pressure in the chamber, as well as the strength of an externally imposed magnetic field. From this, we determined that the plasma temperature decreased with an …