Brandon Sorbom, a senior majoring in electrical engineering and engineering physics at Loyola Marymount University’s Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering, gave the appropriate warning.
“If you touch the power source while it’s on,” pointing to a box on the right side of his display, “you could die,” he said, smiling.
He then picked up two wires, and attached them to the appropriate contacts on his homemade nuclear reactor.
A deep purple glow, which he explained was a plasma reaction, lit up the center of the chamber he created by putting two stainless steel mixing bowls together with a rubber gasket and assorted other everyday items from a home improvement store.
Sorbom is studying nuclear fusion, a potentially safer and cheaper source of energy than is currently used in nuclear power plants. While the demonstration wasn’t a nuclear reaction, it was proof that Sorbom’s device is functioning. During this demonstration, Sorbom used air to produce his reaction; after he graduates in May, he plans a real test using deuterium (a form of hydrogen) that will produce a nuclear fusion.
Sorbom was one of several students demonstrating their original research at the University Honors Program celebration. In opening the event, Brad Elliot Stone, director of LMU’s University Honors Program and associate professor of philosophy, told the audience of parents, students, faculty and administrators that the goal of the program, “is to produce graduates that never stop learning or working for the benefit of others.”
Dani Dirks, a senior fine arts major, displayed samples of beads made by Ugandan women who she is working with to start a fashion business; James Clements, chemical engineering major talked about a project he and several other students are working on in the Republic of Malawi to build a water conveyance system to a school for the blind; Sarah Carratt, a freshman biology student, and sophomore Heather Carmody presented research on the effects of heavy metal pollution on spiders in the Ballona Wetlands.
As for Brandon Sorbom, he said his chose his project because nuclear fusion could make peoples’ lives better if they can figure out how to make it work.
“I feel engineering is a field that makes people’s lives easier and makes things better,” he said. “I narrowed it down to space engineering and energy engineering and I decided that energy engineering will help people more.”