David Kirtley: commitment

Transcript context

…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? Yeah. The operation of a fusion system is pretty fascinating because all of this happens on a time scale where human operators cannot be involved. …cannot really be involved. So you have to have pre-programmed the majority, we call them shots. You’re going to do a shot, and when you’re operating them repetitively and you’re running long periods of time, you still have all computers doing both the triggering and the measuring of how they’re performing, real-time the whole time. So how this typically works, at least in our systems, is that we will design a system with a combination of numerical simulation tools that we’ve developed based off of decades and decades of amazing government programs. National programs developed these numerical codes. We use a code called an MHD, magnetohydrodynamic code. And that’s for people, for the engineers out there who are used to CFD, computational fluid dynamics. This is very similar where you take the same sets of equations actually and add electromagnetic equations on top of those. And so you get magnetohydrodynamic. Are you simulating at the level of a particle? Is there some quantum mechanical aspects to this also? How low does it go?…

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