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The research areas can be broadly categorized in to three activities :
Studies on high temperature magnetically confined plasmas
Basic experiments in plasma physics including Free electron laser, dusty plasmas and other nonlinear phenomena
Industrial plasma processing and application
Current work on high temperature magnetically confined plasmas is being conducted in tokamak Aditya. The plasma is formed by an electrical breakdown in an ultra high vacuum toroidal vessel and a current is inductively driven in the plasma. One has to use auxiliary heating schemes, since the efficiency to heat plasmas drops as the plasma temperature rises. Diagnostics like Thomson scattering for electron temperature measurement, ECE diagnostic for temperature profile measurement, soft X-ray camera and laser blow-off, are carried out on Aditya. A steady state tokamak (SST-1), the first of it's kind in India, is being fabricated and set up, to study issues related to energy, particle and impurity confinement during steady state operation. Plasma disruptions and vertical displacement episodes will be studied. Non-inductive current drive would sustain the plasma current, and different aspects of the current drive would be studied. The prototype fabrication of most of the components of the various subsystems of the tokamak has been completed, and is being tested, before final integration.
Basic experiments, involving relatively cooler, rarer and less complicated plasmas are being carried out to understand the various facets of plasma that are difficult to study in bigger systems. Stability and equilibrium of toroidal plasma in the presence of radio frequency waves and new current drive mechanism with these waves is being studied. Issues related to excitation, propagation and linear, nonlinear interaction of whistler and helicon waves are being studied in a large volume plasma device(LVPD). Free electron laser experiments and experiments to study dusty plasmas are also conducted.
Equilibrium and non-equilibrium plasma properties can be exploited for commercial uses. A multi disciplinary team of physicists, engineers and material scientists are working together to generate advanced material processing technologies. Commercial prototype of medical waste pyrolisis system, plasma nitriding system installation at IGCAR, supply of PSII system to IIT Kharagpur, are some of the major activities concluded by the group at the FCIPT(Facilitation Centre for Industrial Plasma Technologies) centre of IPR.
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