The following movie is by Woodruff Scientific, Inc. It was developed under an ARPA-E Grant. The movie shows a five PFRC modular power plant. The technician is shown for scale. Modular power plants are ideal for power systems because they allow for incremental capital investment. Modules would be added as needed. You can read more about PFRC here.
Experimental work on PFRC-2 was funded by an ARPA-E OPEN 2018 grant. ARPA-E is funding many cutting edge fusion projects including new mirror machines, stellarators and many others.
It was exciting to meet and network with fusion industry and power electronics researchers, and influential leaders from both the private and public sectors at the Summit.
We displayed a prototype Class E amplifier, silicon carbide (SiC) JFET wafers, a PCB board of a load switch, and brochures of NREL.
Princeton Fusion Systems in collaboration with Princeton University, Qorvo, and NREL is developing integrated, power-dense, reliable, and scalable switching power amplifier boards for plasma heating and control applications. We presented the Class E prototype, some samples of the wide bandgap semiconductor silicon carbide (SiC) JFET wafers, and a PCB board for a load switch at our booth at the ARPA-E Summit. A previous post on our website has links to our marketing and technical documents.
The photos below show Stephanie Thomas and Sangeeta Vinoth at the Registration desk of the ARPA-E-2022-Summit.
The picture of the Class E prototype that the PFS presented at the booth has been added to the ARPA-E Innovation Summit website.
Class E prototype build by Princeton University
More pictures of the ARPA-E Summit can be found here.
The Summit helped us to understand the Fusion industry’s needs for power electronics. We design, test, and qualify circuit boards as building blocks for various applications: short pulses, control pulses, and RF amplifiers.
A key takeaway was that there was interest in SiC and GaN wide bandgap semiconductor requirements for high power and high frequency. Researchers asked about radiation-hardened electronics, and some were also interested in high voltage electronics.
There were talks at the Summit about climate change, rethinking solutions for resilience, reliability, and security of electric grid infrastructure, and decarbonization.
