Innovation Winter 2024.25

diameter and weighing over 8,000 kg, still require intricate engineering. “We made rapid progress with these subscale test campaigns, and now we are assembling the full-size coils for LM26,” said Darren Ross, P.Eng., a lead engineer at General Fusion who heads the design of the theta-pinch coil systems on LM26. “These coils need to be powered by our 18 MJ capacitor bank, which releases a pulse of electrical current when we run our machine.” The prototyping work has required many other technologies to be developed in parallel, including methods for obtaining metrics from the machine. “One of the major challenges with LM26 is getting diagnostics into a very restrictive space under restrictive conditions,” said Claire Preston, a project manager at General Fusion specializing in diagnostic engineering. Full teams are dedicated to the task of getting camera views of the compression testbed or measuring system temperatures and energy levels. “We need the systems to be cleaner so that they can work under the high vacuum for healthy plasma." Approaching the commercial market Most recently, General Fusion has been collaborating with Vancouver-based TRIUMF, Canada’s measurements. Auxiliary technologies like these have contributed to General Fusion’s tally of more than 190 issued and pending patents over the life of the company. They aim at achieving commercialization for the technology in the next decade. Through the various technical challenges, the technology of fusion has been steadily progressing for the General Fusion team – and the end result is in sight. “If you keep working at it, if you keep throwing resources at it, things will national particle accelerator laboratory, to develop neutron counting and ion temperature

Mike Donaldson, a vice president at General Fusion, explains the company’s compression approach with a prior model.

continue to get better – and that’s happening with our technology,” said Donaldson. “It takes some planning, and some organization, and delays might happen – but these challenges aren’t just going to resolve themselves. You’ve got to grind it out.” And though the everyday work may involve addressing microscopic

fractions of the problem, the team keeps its end goal in sight. Said Ross, “Clean fusion power can revolutionize the electrical grid as we know it. Fusion is one of the greatest challenges of our time. I find working on something so complex, but that would also change the world in such a big way, to be very exciting.”

Innovation Winter 2024/25

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