Illinois Plasma Institute
The Illinois Plasma Institute (IPI) is an initiative of the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. IPI’s founding was driven by a desire to rethink existing pathways to the commercialization of new technologies developed in academic research settings. Combining the best of both worlds, IPI provides a space where forward-thinking industrial partners can pair their own research and development staff with academic researchers closer to the underlying science behind a new technology. Working in concert on a shared platform, advances made it the laboratory may be implemented onto production-level equipment shortening the time to adoption in high-volume manufacturing.
Complementary to cooperation in the lab, assignees from industrial partners also find easy access to the College’s Masters of Engineering in Plasma Engineering, a professional Master’s program designed to prepare workers from a wide variety of technical fields for the unique opportunities that plasma processing has to offer.
Research
Publications
People
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How Heat, Radiation, and Pores Rearrange a Reactor Steel – One Atom at a Time
If you’re designing structural steel for the inside of a fusion reactor, “does it melt” is the easy question. The hard one is subtler: as neutrons slam into the lattice and temperatures swing from 600 K to 1300 K, how does the atomic-scale order of the metal itself degrade — and can engineered porosity, deliberately…
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Ion Energy Distribution and Transport Dynamics in HiPIMS with Positive Cathode Reversal for Semiconductor Industry Applications
The Illinois Plasma Institute (IPI) is proud to announce that graduate student Tag Choi has successfully defended his PhD thesis. Tag’s dissertation addresses the complexity of chip manufacturing that has increased dramatically alongside the demand for more advanced semiconductor devices. A crucial step in semiconductor manufacturing is deposition, and physical vapor deposition (PVD) is commonly…
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Printable Isn’t Licensable: Mapping the Real Path to 3D-Printed Nuclear Reactor Parts
Additive manufacturing (AM) can do things conventional machining can’t: internal cooling channels, lattice architectures, graded transitions, near-net shapes that would be impossible to cast, forge, or weld together. For a jet bracket or a car part, that’s usually enough to justify switching to AM. For a nuclear reactor component, it isn’t — a part also…
Master of Engineering in Plasma Engineering
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This non-thesis, 32-credit hour M.Eng. program provides an in-depth education in plasma processing, plasma technology, and plasma science. This masterʼs degree in Plasma Engineering is specifically designed for students looking to enter the industry upon graduation. The detailed curriculum, real-world experience, and laboratory experiences provided by this program equip graduates with the knowledge to utilize, understand, and innovate plasma-related applications delivering highly marketable skills that are in demand by employers across various industries.