Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has officially confirmed the news of building and testing a record-breaking electromagnet called the Central Solenoid Model Coil (CSMC), which marks a major step for the company’s wider effort to bring clean and abundant fusion power to the grid.
Talk about fusion power for a second, it markedly makes up a process which also powers the sun. As for how it works, the stated process basically combines two lighter atoms into one heavier one so to release tremendous amounts of energy. Making the methodology an even more attractive of proposition is its inherently safe nature, as well as its ability to use abundant fuel, and produce no high-level radioactive waste.
According to certain reports, CSMC success, when placed next to a similar achievement with the Toroidal Field Model Coil (TFMC) test in 2021, directly validates the two types of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets that CFS needs for SPARC, a machine the company is building to demonstrate net fusion power.
In case you weren’t aware, the TFMC milestone basically proved out magnets that operate with steady electrical current, whereas on the other hand, CSMC did the same for magnets with current pulses that ramp up and down.
Turning our attention towards the results, though, they revealed that the technology was successful in ramping electrical current up to 50,000 amps, the maximum operational current planned in SPARC. This is as much electricity as 250 modern American houses would consume, if each were drawing maximum power.
Next up, we must dig into how CSMC was able to use the stated current for creating a 5.7 tesla magnetic field, about 100,000 times the strength of Earth’s magnetic field. Furthermore, it rapidly discharged the magnet at a rate of around 4 tesla per second.
“Where the mission of the TFMC was to demonstrate a steady strength, the CSMC needed to demonstrate speed,” said Ted Golfinopoulos, one of the MIT Principal Investigators who led more than 30 PSFC scientists, engineers, and technicians who helped design, build, and test the CSMC. “Hundreds of hands have touched this coil, from its inception on the drafting board to its long and complicated test program. The ingenuity, perseverance, and heart shown by this close-knit team was as impressive as the coil that sprang from their labors.”
Moving on, the CSMC tech in question also reached a record stored energy for pulsed magnets of 3.7 megajoules, something which translates to total energy of 5 full-size pickup trucks driving at 60 mph. Beyond that, the given results would demonstrate merits related to CSMC’s novel fiber optic-based system in the context of detecting overheating events called quenches that can damage the magnet if not addressed.
Among other things, we must mention how experts from CFS and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) together tested both the TFMC and CSMC at MIT’s Plasma Science & Fusion Center (PSFC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This also happens to be the location where CFS and MIT designed, built, and tested the SPARC TFMC between 2019 and 2021. The collaboration, on a holistic note, would go on to develop CSMC’s superconducting cables and extend decades of work at the university on the high magnetic field approach underlying SPARC.
The whole development delivers a rather interesting follow up to CFS concluding the development of its HTS cable technology called PIT VIPER, which is designed for powerful pulsed-power magnets like SPARC’s central solenoid (CS) and poloidal field (PF) magnets. At present, PIT VIPER includes a new design with internal electrical insulation to minimize heating when rapidly ramping current in an HTS magnet.
“This is an important milestone on the road to commercialization,” said Brandon Sorbom, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. “When we hit the button and put current through the magnet, it performed like a champ and hit all its major test objectives. The fact that our team was able to develop this technology all the way from benchtop to a fully integrated, at-scale superconducting magnet in just a couple of years is huge.”
