Plasma deep bore drilling drills 30 times faster in hard rock than conventional thus enabler for geothermal energy to give CO2 neutral, 24/7 energy almost anywhere in the world. Also for disposal of HL nuclear waste, mining and tunnelling applications.

Mechanical drills generally break the rock under compression, cracking about 3mm ahead while the plasma torches heat the rock locally up to 50,000 deg c that cause impurities within the rock up to 30 mm deep to expand resulting in massive pressures that cause the rock to fail under tension, with cuttings spalling away.

The technology has been developed with funding from Shell Technology Ventures at the Centre for Disruptive Innovation at the Academy of Sciences in Sofia, with support from the Sofia University in Bulgaria, and is linked with the Tomsk Polytechnical University and the Novosibirsk State University of Russia, the world top institutes on jet-plasma technology.

The potential application of such a technology are numerous with the following covered below.

 

 Click here to see presentation given at the 'International Meeting on DBD of high level radioactive waste' in Sheffield on 13 June 2016'

The following film clips are the demonstrations referenced in the above presentation: