David Kirtley

And so you need to be able to build a system.

And this is what we spend a lot of time with.

And I made the joke that in a lot of ways, Helion is an electrical engineering company to be able to both program, control, and then detect how they're operating.

and do it all very fast.

So in a typical sequence, we will pre-program, the operators will pre-program a sequence, usually fed from a numerical simulation of expecting how the fusion system will perform.

We start with a set of calculations.

We then pre-program all of these electrical switches to a certain sequence to be able to inject the fuel, reverse it, and then compress it up to fusion conditions.

And then we trigger that and then let it go and measure fusion happening.

But during that process have to be real time recording and measuring all of the semiconductors and all of the switching in the system.

I don't wanna talk about measuring fusion diagnostics.

That's a whole nother thing, which we can talk about.

This is just on the electrical control side.

And so some of the pioneering things we've been able to do is that real time you're monitoring all of these switches.

You're watching who is triggering correctly, who is not triggering correctly.

And if systems aren't working, you're shutting down this because you want to make sure that all the sequences are operating correctly.

So some of the key diagnostics, it's actually pretty amazing that even early in my career, we didn't have a lot of fiber optics built into the system.

And now it's absolutely essential.

And so every one of these electrical switches has fiber optic signals going into it and fiber optic signals coming out, understanding how it's actually operating.

And real time, all of these systems are being monitored by more fiber optics.

We call these Rogowski coils, but they're electromagnetic coils that are powered by the electrical current themselves.