"Any Publicity is Good Publicity"

Sometimes my research ends up in textbooks, sometimes in press releases. Below is a short list of highlights.

• US DoE Office of Science Highlights - "Tokamak Experiments Provide Unique Data for Validating Spacecraft Heat Shield Ablation Models. Scientists used tokamak plasmas to study how heat shield materials protect spacecraft in the extreme conditions of atmospheric entry", January 6, 2023 (pdf)

• WIRED magazine - "The Real Fusion Energy Breakthrough Is Still Decades Away", December 13, 2022 (pdf)

  • • "But fusion researchers press on toward an elusive goal, even if it may not be attained by any generation alive today. “I think we should look at this with optimism,” says Dmitri Orlov, a research scientist at the University of California, San Diego who studies tokamak design. “Today is like watching a baby learning to walk. Eventually, it will run a marathon.”

• Discovery Curiosity Daily podcast discusses our spacecraft heat shield carbon ablation experiments in "Gas Giants at Home" part, September 16, 2022

• ITER Newsline - "ITER International School on Operation Scenarios and Control", September 12, 2022 (pdf)

  • • "Excellently hosted by Charles Greenfield (GA and USBPO) and Dmitriy Orlov (UCSD), the 2022 ITER International School provided young scientists and engineers with a taste of the stimulating, multi-disciplinary and challenging field that is magnetic confinement fusion."

• WIRED magazine - "DeepMind Has Trained an AI to Control Nuclear Fusion", February 16, 2022 (pdf)

  • • "The more complex and high performance the tokamak, the greater the need to control more quantities with higher and higher reliability and accuracy,” says Dmitri Orlov, an associate research scientist at the Center for Energy Research in San Diego. An AI-controlled tokamak could be optimized to control the transfer of heat out of the reaction to the walls of the vessel and prevent damaging “plasma instabilities.” The reactors themselves could be redesigned to take advantage of the tighter control offered by reinforcement learning.

• Furman University News - "Kostadinova '14 Lands Mention in Merriam-Webster's", December 6, 2021 (pdf)

  • • "A colleague of Kostadinova’s, Dmitri Orlov, an associate research scientist at the University of California San Diego, sent her a link to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary for the word “contain.” In the example sentences used to explain the word in context, the dictionary editors chose a passage from a Wired magazine article citing Orlov’s and her work. Here’s an excerpt: "Kostadinova and Orlov are calling for more collaboration between the fusion and space research communities, which both have an interest in understanding plasma reactions—and in developing substances that can contain them." (image)

• BusinessAM - "Il existe enfin une utilisation pratique de la fusion nucléaire. Mais ce n’est pas ce que à quoi vous vous attendez", November 20, 2021(pdf)

• ANS (American Nuclear Society) Nuclear Newswire "DIII-D tokamak used to test spacecraft heat shield materials", November 16, 2021 (pdf)

• WIRED magazine - "Finally, a Practical Use for Nuclear Fusion", November 15, 2021 (pdf)

  • • Researchers used the roiling temperatures of an experimental fusion reactor for a surprising purpose: testing heat shield materials for spacecraft.

• AZOM - "Researchers Use Fusion Reactors to Test Futuristic Spacecraft Heat Shields", November 9, 2021 (pdf)

• American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics press release "Feeling the Heat: Fusion Reactors used to Test Spacecraft Heat Shields", November 2021 (pdf)

• General Atomics press release "Researchers Study Spacecraft Heat Shields Using DIII-D Fusion Facility", August 18, 2021 (pdf)

• Tapan K. Sengupta "Theoretical and Computational Aerodynamics", Wiley, 2015, ISBN: 978-1-118-78759-5

  • • Chapter 13.4.2 (pp. 471-474) "Orlov's model" (pdf)