Jesus Jose Ramos

Jesus Jose Ramos

Massachusetts Institute of Technology USA

Jesus J. Ramos is a Principal Research Scientist at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He received his Doctor degree in Physics from Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1977. Starting as a postdoctoral fellow that year, he has since held research positions at M.I.T., working on the theory of magnetically confined plasmas. In over 80 refereed publications, he has contributed significant results to the theory of magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium and stability and has developed an original rigorous formalism to describe the hybrid fluid-kinetic behavior of weakly collisional magnetized plasmas. He was responsible for the magnetohydrodynamic analysis in the proposal of the Alcator C-mod tokamak and has participated in the design teams and advisory committees for other major magnetic confinement experiments. He has taught graduate courses on magnetohydrodynamics at M.I.T. and has had a visiting professor appointment at the National Institute of Fusion Science of Japan.

Research stay at UC3M: DEPARTMENT OF BIOENGINEERING AND AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

Project: The proposed research project will apply advanced models of weakly collisional plasmas to problems in spacecraft propulsion and magnetic confinement. The plasma parameters of interest for magnetic nozzle propulsion pertain usually to regimes characterized by collisional mean free paths much longer than the typical dimensions of the system, for which the conventional fluid descriptions do not apply. The same feature is crucial to the high temperature plasmas relevant to nuclear fusion in magnetic confinement devices. This motivates the effort to develop more realistic kinetic or hybrid fluid-kinetic descriptions that include finite Larmor radius and anisotropic pressure tensor effects. Specific problems of interest are the collisionless electron cooling in geometrically divergent magnetic field lines, the effects of suprathermal electrons produced by radio-frequency plasma sources, the downstream transition to a fully unmagnetized plasma and the closure of longitudinal currents under plasma detachment conditions.

Stay period: JAN 2016 - MAR 2017