I am a Nuclear Engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee. My work concerns the plasma-material interactions in magnetically-confined fusion reactors. Currently, I am interested in the evolution of impurity transport in the scrape-off layer (SOL) between the main plasma and the material wall. I am a member of the Fusion Energy Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where I can take advantage of high-performance computing (HPC) resources to simulate wall erosion and impurity transport within a plasma environment.
Excessive concentrations of larger impurities in a fusion plasma can be detrimental to the reactor heat efficiency because impurities cool the plasma by colliding with other particles in the plasma and then emitting that energy in the form of radiation. Thus, it is imperative to accurately model impurity leakage to best predict desirable fusion conditions.
Email: hayes@utk.edu