David Kirtley

So as these switches are conducting, they broadcast a signal that says, yes, I'm electrically conducting an optical signal, fiber optics, that come back to a central repository where we detect those signals.

And so real-time, we're monitoring all of this so that we know that these systems are behaving and operating at their optimal performance.

Yeah, the operation of a fusion system is pretty fascinating because all of this happens on a time scale where human operators cannot really be involved.

And so you have to have pre-programmed the majority.

We call them shots.

You're going to do a shot.

And when you're operating them repetitively and you're running long periods of times, you still have all computers doing both the triggering and the measuring of how they're performing real time, the whole time.

And so how this typically works, at least in our systems, is that we will design a system with a combination of, with some numerical simulation tools that we've developed based off of decades and decades of amazing government programs.

National lab programs developed these numerical codes.

We use a kind of a code called an MHD, Magneto Hydrodynamic Code.

And that's for people, for the engineers out there who are used to CFD, computational fluid dynamics.

This is very similar.

You take the same sets of equations, actually, and add the electromagnetic equations on top of those.

And so you get magnetohydrodynamic.

We have multiple codes at different levels because one of the main computational challenges is, amazingly, even given all that we have built for fusion systems, computers are still not fast enough to simulate everything.

And so we have a number of codes that we use.

One we call fluid codes, where you treat the ions, the electrons, all these fusion particles, you treat them as fluids, as gases, ideal gas law with electromagnetic forces.

In those, we can simulate not just the fusion fuel, which is important, but all of the electrical circuitry.

We talked about capacitors and magnetic coils and the electrical current and the switches.

Well, we actually simulate the full thing, starting literally with the SPICE model.