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The increasing interest in the development of small flying air vehicles has given rise to a strong need to thoroughly understand low-speed aerodynamics. The barn owl is a well-known example of a biological system that possesses a high level of adaptation to its habitat and as such can inspire future small-scale air vehicle design. The combination of the owl-specific wing geometry and plumage adaptations with the flexibility of the wing structure yields a highly complex flow field, still enabling the owl to perform stable and at the same time silent low-speed gliding flight. To investigate the effects leading to such a characteristic flight, time-resolved stereoscopic particle-image velocimetry (TR-SPIV) measurements are performed on a prepared natural owl wing in a range of angles of attack 0° ≤ α ≤ 6° and Reynolds numbers 40,000 ≤ Re(c) ≤ 120,000 based on the chord length at a position located at 30% of the halfspan from the owl's body. The flow field does not show any flow separation on the suction side, whereas flow separation is found on the pressure side for all investigated cases. The flow field on the pressure side is characterized by large-scale vortices which interact with the flexible wing structure. The good agreement of the shedding frequency of the pressure side vortices with the frequency of the trailing-edge deflection indicates that the structural deformation is induced by the flow field on the pressure side. Additionally, the reduction of the time-averaged mean wing curvature at high Reynolds numbers indicates a passive lift-control mechanism that provides constant lift in the entire flight envelope of the owl.

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AC Ohmic coil operation experiments with frequencies up to 10 kHz were performed on the TST-2 spherical tokamak device, and the pre-ionization process was studied in detail. The minimum loop voltage for pre-ionization was 0.4 V, which corresponds to 0.5 V m −1 at the inboard limiter. Dependences of growth rate and saturation level of the process on various parameters were obtained, and they are compared with a time-dependent 0-dimensional model based on Townsend avalanche and loss along field lines. Most of the dependences are reproduced qualitatively by the model, and quantitative differences are within a factor of several. However, the external vertical field dependence of the appearance time, which is defined as the time to observe a plasma, and the isotope effect cannot be reproduced by the model. An ambipolar diffusion state which is predicted theoretically but mitigated experimentally is discussed. It was found that secondary electron emission at the limiter surfaces is a candidate mechanism to mitigate the state.

Non-inductive plasma current start-up experiments were performed using the lower hybrid wave (LHW) on the TST-2 spherical tokamak. The density limit, observed in previous experiments using the outboard-launch antenna, disappeared after changing the plasma condition in the scrape-off layer, and the plasma current reached about 20 kA. In order to improve the LHW power deposition in the plasma core through an up-shift of the parallel wavenumber during the first pass through the plasma, a new top-launch antenna was designed, fabricated and installed. The plasma current ramp-up to 12 kA was achieved using the top-launch antenna alone in a preliminary experiment. Ray-tracing calculations using the measured plasma parameters showed a large up-shift during the first pass, satisfying the strong electron Landau damping condition in the plasma core.