HIDRA, the former WEGA stellarator/tokamak, arrived at Illinois in Nov. 2014 from the Max-Planck-Institut fur Plasmaphysik and has been under assembly for the last 18 months (watch assembly). On Friday April 22, 2016 HIDRA had its first confined plasma at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, event attended by over 100 people including the Dean of Engineering, the Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering Dept. Head, most of the faculty and numerous alumni visitors. The hard work of Prof. Daniel Andruczyk and many undergraduate and graduate students, as well as help from Illinois Facilities and Services were recognized. The device, in operation since 1975 at various sites with intermittent interruptions, is one of the long-lived fusion experiments and now available for plasma physics and fusion research at Illinois.

Professor Allain was invited to present the talk titled Challenges to a foundational understanding of the plasma-material interface in plasma-burning nuclear fusion reactors in the 2015 – 2016 Nuclear Engineering Colloquium Series at The University of Tennessee this past February, 2016. The complete talk is available for viewing at the following link: View Nuclear Colloquium Presentation Feb 9, 2016

Professor Allain was invited speaker at the II International Seminar on Biomaterials, Biomechanics and Regenerative Medicine at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia. Professor Allain presented the talk Intelligent Design of Advanced Nanostructured Biointerfaces for Regenerative Medicine Applications and also visited Ruta N Corporation, an institution that is pursuing the consolidation of Medellin as a city of knowledge undertaking the development of a technology district.

Professor Allain visited Oak Ridge National Laboratory for an Invited Seminar titled Challenges and strategies to experimental validation of multi-scale nuclear fusion PMI computational modelling this past February 2016

Prof. Allain has been recently awarded a $1.1 million Fusion Energy Sciences grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to support his research on plasma-material interactions that involve the first few microns of the material surface. Allain’s research group has been pioneering this work discovering adaptive materials capable of sustaining the far-from-equilibrium conditions found in nuclear thermonuclear reactors. These materials include: nanoporous and mesoporous tungsten composites, extreme-refined doped refractory alloys, and self-healing nanocomposite W-Li pseudo-alloys. Prof. Allain will be working closely with NPRE Prof. James Stubbins, a co-principal investigator on the project, to understand thermo-mechanical properties of these complex materials.

For more information you may read the NPRE News Article

Professor Allain was invited speaker at the workshop Sensitivity, Error and Uncertainty Quantification for Atomic, Plasma and Material Data organized by the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University. The focus was theory and simulation relevant to fusion and astrophysical plasmas including their interface with materials such as is necessary in the design of practical fusion reactors. Professor Allain presented the talk titled Challenges and Strategies To Experimental Validation of Multi-Scale Nuclear Fusion PMI Computational Modeling.

The International Conference on Fusion Reactor Materials (ICFRM) is the major international forum for information exchange about materials to be used in future fusion power systems. Today at the 17th International Conference in Aachen, Germany Professor J.P. Allain gave the invited talk In-Situ Characterization of Extreme-Refined and Porous Radiation-Resistant Tungsten Materials at the session on Plasma-Facing components. The new Director-General of the ITER Organization, Bernard Bigot and the EUROfusion Programme Manager, Tony Donné were keynote speakers of the ICRFM-17.

The Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid – ICMM, an institute of the Spanish National Research Council, invited Professor Allain to give a research seminar this summer in their seminar series Nanostructures, Surfaces and Coatings. His talk titled Irradiation-driven nanosynthesis: harnessing and manipulating nature’s self-organized systems at the nanoscale addressed the nanopatterning of III-V semiconductors and SI.