Author: Stephanie Thomas

ASCENDx

As a follow-up to the TriAgency workshop on Compact Fusion which took place on April 28, PFS was invited to join several Fusion Industry Association members on an AIAA ASCENDx summit on June 15, “Accelerating Pathways to Space”:

ASCENDxSummit: Accelerating Pathways to Space

Our panel on “New Opportunities in Fusion for Space Power and Propulsion” was moderated by Julie Reiss of Aerospace Corp and included us, Helicity Space, NearStar Fusion, and Tokamak Energy. You can register to rewatch our panel discussion anytime!

A key takeaway from the TriAgency workshop was that investment in compact fusion is strategic for both space and defense applications. NASA’s Ron Litchford was quoted as saying:

Compact fusion stands as a well deserving candidate for an aggressive whole-of-government R&D initiative.

Ron Litchford, Principal Technologist of NASA’s Game Changing Development Program, April 2021

We appreciated the opportunity to participate in the panel and will continue to advocate for more investment in compact fusion!

Thomson scattering

Thomson scattering is the industry standard diagnostic for measuring electron temperature, typically requiring, large, expensive, custom lasers. We are fortunate that ARPA-E has funded a team from Oakridge National Laboratory to build a portable Thomson system from commercial parts, and they are now installing and calibrating the diagnostic on the PFRC-2!

These measurements will give us critical insight on the plasma temperatures we are achieving with RMFo as a function of input power!

Portable Diagnostic: from ORNL to PPPL

Our team is mentioned in this press release from ORNL about the “traveling” high-temperature plasma diagnostic they are building:

https://www.ornl.gov/news/ornl-team-builds-portable-diagnostic-fusion-experiments-shelf-items

The ORNL diagnostic team
The ORNL diagnostic team

ARPA-E is supporting the development of several such portable diagnostics in tandem with their other fusion efforts, including our OPEN project. The ORNL team hopes that their “suitcase Thomson scattering” diagnostic will be on its way to us this summer!

When installed, it will measure the electron temperature and density profiles in the PFRC-2 experiment as a function of radius, as often as once per millisecond. The profiles measured will allow us to probe the internal structure of the plasma, but beyond that will also allow us to better interpret the results of our other diagnostics!

Princeton Propeller Talk

Princeton Propeller is a series of talks supported by the Princeton Area Alumni Association (PA3) to showcase technical innovation. Our team was recently invited to give a talk on the new frontier of commercial fusion development! Dr. Swanson and Ms. Thomas took the podium on February 11, 2020, at the Quadrangle Club on Princeton’s campus.

Download our slides at this link:
“Frontiers in Commercializing Fusion Development” Slides

We are now joined by over a dozen private companies in the UK and the US pursuing commercial fusion development. Recent programs in the Department of Energy and their ARPA-E advanced projects division have supported teams in magneto-inertial confinement (ALPHA), compact tokamaks, pinches, and our PFRC (OPEN), and public-private partnerships between labs and the private companies (INFUSE). It’s a great time to be in fusion research!

PFRC-2 Posters at APS Division of Plasma Physics

We have been hard at work on our ARPA-E project and just submitted our second quarterly report! Our team, including our summer interns, presented several posters on the latest PFRC-2 experimental results at the APS Division of Plasma Physics meeting, held Oct. 21-25 in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

Plasma & Fusion Session

  • Neutral density measurements on the PFRC-2, Eugene S. Evans et al., UP10.101
  • Spectroscopic Line Ratio Determination of Electron Density, Electron Temperature, and H2 Dissociation Fraction in PFRC-2 Pulsed Hydrogen Plasmas, E. Palmerduca & S. Punjabi-Vinoth, et al, UP10.102
  • Recent X-ray results from the PFRC-2 experiment, C. Swanson et al, UP10.100
  • Visible light imagining of low frequency oscillations in the PFRC, P. Jandovitz et al, UP10.96

Undergraduate Research Session

  • Floating Potentials of End Plates in the PFRC-2 Divertor Regions, J. Cohen et al, JP10.33
  • Neutral gas inventory in the PFRC-2 during RMF plasma heating, K. R. Torrens et al, JP10.49
  • A study of RMF-plasma coupling on varying seed plasma parameters, G. Jusino et al, JP10.40

ARPA-E OPEN 2018 Selection

Princeton Fusion Systems has been awarded $1.25 Million from ARPA-E for Low-Radioactivity Compact Fusion Devices

Today ARPA-E announced announced that PFS has received a competitive $1.25 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), as part of the Energy cohort of OPEN 2018.

Princeton Fusion Systems seeks to develop technologies to enable future commercial fusion power. Our team’s concept is a small, clean, and portable design based on a field-reversed-configuration plasma. The concept uses an innovative method called odd-parity rotating magnetic field (RMF) to drive electrical current and heat the plasma to fusion temperatures. Under this award, the team will pursue improved electron and ion temperatures through RMF, as well as identify the modeling needed to elucidate the key heating and loss mechanisms for the fusion reactor concept. The team’s ultimate power plant design seeks a very small footprint for a compact, potentially transportable, distributed energy resource that is fully dispatchable and emissions-free.

PFS received this competitive award from ARPA-E’s OPEN 2018 program, in which teams develop innovative technologies to transform the nation’s energy system. OPEN solicitations are an open call to scientists and engineers for technologies across the entire scope of ARPA-E’s energy mission.