David Kirtley: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yes, great. The diagnostic systems are really one of the keys to how we do this effectively, because you need to be able to tell the system, “We’re going to trigger electrical current, and we’re going to do it in a microsecond, and we need to know if it’s working right. ” In one of these FRC or these pulsed magnetic systems, you won’t have just one electrical switch. I’ve mentioned 100 mega amps, 100 million amps of electrical current. Even the big transistors we use can only run at 30,000 amps, so you’ll end up with tens of thousands. In fact, the systems we build now, tens of thousands of parallel electrical switches all operating in harmony together. So you need to be able to build a system, and this is what we spend a lot of time with. And I made the joke that in a lot of ways, Helion is an electrical engineering company. To be able to both program, control, and then detect how they’re operating, and do it all very fast. In a typical sequence, we will pre-program. The operators will pre-program a sequence usually fed from a numerical simulation of expecting how the fusion system will perform. We start with a set of calculations. We then pre-program all of these electrical switches to a certain sequence to be able to inject the fuel, reverse it, and then compress it up to fusion conditions. Then we trigger that, and then let it go, and measure fusion happening. But during that process, we have to be real-time recording and measuring all of the semiconductors and all of the switching in the system. I’m not going to talk about measuring fusion diagnostics. That’s a whole other thing, which we can talk about. This is just on the electrical control side. Some of the pioneering things we’ve been able to do is that real-time you’re monitoring all of these switches. You’re watching who is triggering correctly, who is not triggering correctly. And if systems aren’t working, you’re shutting this down because you want to make sure that all the sequences are operating correctly. Some of the key diagnostics, it’s actually pretty amazing that even early in my career, we didn’t have a lot of fiber optics built into the system. Now it’s absolutely essential. So every one of these electrical switches has fiber optic signals going into it and fiber optic signals coming out, understanding how it’s actually operating. And real-time, all of these systems are being monitored by more fiber optics. We call these Rogowski coils, but they’re electromagnetic coils that are powered by the electrical current themselves. So as the switches are conducting, they broadcast an optical signal that says, “Yes, I’m electrically conducting,” fiber optics that come back to a central repository where we detect those signals. So real-time, we’re monitoring all of this so that we know that these systems are behaving and operating at their optimal performance. What’s the role of numerical simulation in all of this? I guess, ahead of time, how much numerical simulation are you doing to understand how the system is going to behave, how the different parameters all come together? The electrical system and how that all maps to the fusion that’s actually generated?…

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