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Featured Application Thermal plasma technology is an environmentally friendly process for the treatment of waste streams. Its wide temperature range makes it suitable for almost any chemical composition of waste. Thermal processing such as incineration is most commonly used for the treatment of waste streams, whereby often-incomplete combustion of organic waste can lead to dangerous products in the exhaust gases. Thermal plasma technology with its wide temperature range is suitable to treat almost any chemical composition of wastes. It enables the efficient and environmentally friendly conversion of organic waste into energy or chemicals, as well as the pyrolysis of hazardous organic compounds The limitations of conventional technologies and stricter environmental legislation on the processing of wastes make plasma technologies increasingly attractive. Priority is given to environmental quality at affordable costs and to the use of innovative thermochemical conversion technologies (gasification and pyrolysis) to contribute to sustainable development and circular economy in which waste is managed as a resource.

In a nuclear fusion experiment, the concept of an Integrated Data Analysis (IDA) allows the consistent estimation of plasma parameters from heterogeneous data sets [1]. Here, the determination of the ion effective charge (Zeff ), a critical local measure of impurity concentration, is considered. Several diagnostic methods exist for the determination of Zeff , but the results are in general not in agreement. Moreover, so far none of the available methods has provided a Zeff estimate that is reliable over the entire plasma cross-section, which is at present a real challenge. In this work, the problem of Zeff estimation is approached from the perspective of IDA, in the framework of Bayesian probability theory. The ultimate goal is the estimation of a full Zeff profile that is consistent both with measured bremsstrahlung emissivities, as well as individual impurity spectral line intensities obtained from Charge Exchange Spectroscopy (CXS). We present an overview of the various uncertainties that enter the calculation of a Zeff profile from bremsstrahlung data on the one hand, and line intensity data on the other hand. These appear at several levels, including the measurement process itself (together with independent electron density and temperature measurements), the inversion procedure (including knowledge of the magnetic equilibrium), the atomic data, the diagnostic calibrations, etc. We discuss a simple Bayesian model permitting the estimation of a central value for Zeff and the electron density ne on TEXTOR from bremsstrahlung emissivity measurements in the visible, and carbon densities derived from CXS. Both the central Zeff and ne are sampled using an MCMC algorithm. Extensions of the model to a full Bayesian analysis, incorporating all critical measurement and model uncertainties, are examined. Relevance to ITER through the pilot active beam experiment on TEXTOR is discussed. References: [1] R. Fischer and A. Dinklage, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 75, 4237 (2004).

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) will be the detector dedicated to the study of nucleus-nucleus collisions at the LHC. The muon spectrometer of ALICE is dedicated to the measurement of heavy flavors in the muon channel. A brief description of the ALICE muon spectrometer and its physics program is reported. The expected performances for open and hidden charm and bottom measurements are presented. In this paper we show how a one dimensional fluid model can be used to interpret data obtained from an inclined Mach-probe or a Gundestrup probe. We use an analytical approximation of the solution of the differential equations describing the relation between the plasma flow and the measured ion saturation currents at the probe’s surface. The parameters of the approximate analytical solution are determined by comparison with the exact numerical solution of the equations. In this way we are able to measure the parallel as well as the perpendicular Mach numbers over the whole parameter range with a minimum accuracy of 90%. In this paper we show how a two dimensional fluid model can be used to interpret data obtained from an inclined Mach-probe or a Gundestrup probe. We use an analytical approximation of the solution of the differential equations describing the relation between the plasma flow and the measured ion saturation currents at the probe's surface. The parameters of this analytical solution are determined by comparison with the exact numerical solution of the equations. In this way we are able to measure the parallel as well as the perpendicular Mach numbers over the whole parameter range with a minimum accuracy of 90%.