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The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a private industry partner recently demonstrated the reliability of a new pulsed-power architecture with potential application in the future for national security and the commercialization of fusion energy.
The LLNL-designed and built prototype, dubbed Sirius, is a small-scale impedance-matched Marx generator (IMG) intended to deliver a fast, efficient electrical pulse to create extreme conditions or states of matter needed inertial fusion energy or high-energy-density science experiments, Pacific Fusion officials said in a statement.
The recent milestone occurred when Sirius surpassed 3,000 shots, signaling a proof of concept for the IMG, lab officials said in a statement announcing the feat.
The architecture is the core technology Pacific Fusion is scaling for its own fusion energy system with the goal of net facility gain by 2030 and commercialization of fusion energy.
Meanwhile, LLNL is evaluating the potential of IMG for future applications in areas such as fusion energy, high-energy-density science, dynamic materials experiments and stockpile modernization, according to Bill Stygar, LLNL pulsed-power researcher and co-inventor of the IMG concept.
“For a future IMG-powered accelerator concept, reliability is a key requirement,” Stygar said in a statement from LLNL. “We needed to show that our components could last 3,000 shots and that their reliability was high enough for a next-generation machine.”
“It provides critical evidence that the core pulsed-power architecture can operate reliably and repeatedly, while generating an extensive dataset that informs Pacific Fusion’s designs,” Pacific Fusion founder and chief technology officer Keith LeChien said of the 3,000-shot milestone. “That validation has helped reduce engineering risk as we scale the technology from a national laboratory prototype into the much larger modules that will power our fusion system.”
LeChien is also a co-inventor of the IMG concept.
Pacific Fusion has completed and validated a pulsed-power prototype that is 11 times larger than Sirius, LeChien told Livermore Vine in an email interview.
The company is currently working to demonstrate a system that is about 40 times the size of Sirius, he added.
For LLNL, the 3,000-shot campaign was considered a key step in advancing Sirius toward technology readiness level 5, up from level 4 in which a component has been validated in a relevant laboratory test environment.
“We’re trying to get this technology to a point where it can be a viable candidate for the next step, when we’re ready to make the next step,” said Kumar Raman, group leader of the magnetic drive program at LLNL.
Sirius was initially developed and demonstrated through LLNL’s laboratory-directed research and development program between the fiscal years of 2020 and 2022.
The 3,000-shot campaign was supported by a cooperative research and development agreement with Pacific Fusion.
