Author: Sangeeta Vinoth

Princeton Fusion Systems Awarded Three DOE INFUSE 2022a Grants

The Department of Energy announced the First Round of the FY 2022 Public-Private Partnership Awards to Advance Fusion Energy. The awards list contains 18 awardees. Princeton Fusion Systems, also known as Princeton Satellite Systems, received three awards:

Electron density profiles on PFRC with USPR: Ultrashort Pulse Reflectometry (USPR) is a plasma diagnostic technique that would be used on the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) to measure electron density profiles. Such profile measurements provide insight into the structure of PFRC plasma and can improve our estimates of confinement time. Our University partner is University of California, Davis, PI Dr. Neville Luhmann.

Evaluating RF antenna designs for PFRC plasma heating and sustainment: We intend to analyze RF antenna performance parameters critical to the validity of robust PFRC-type fusion reactor designs. Team member University of Rochester will support TriForce simulations and contractor Plasma Theory and Computation, Inc. will support RMF code simulations. Our national lab partner is Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, PI Dr. Sam Cohen.

Stabilizing PFRC plasmas against macroscopic low frequency instabilities: This award will use the TriForce code to simulate several plasma stabilization techniques for the PFRC-2 experiment. Our lab partner is PPPL and the team again includes the University of Rochester.

These awards will help us advance PFRC technology. Contact us for more information!

TriForce model of the PFRC-1 experiment

ARPA-E Innovation Summit in Denver, CO

ARPA-E Summit held at Denver, CO.

It was exciting to meet and network with fusion industry and power electronics researchers, and influential leaders from both the private and public sectors at the Summit.

We displayed a prototype Class E amplifier, silicon carbide (SiC) JFET wafers, a PCB board of a load switch, and brochures of NREL.

Princeton Fusion Systems in collaboration with Princeton University, Qorvo, and NREL is developing integrated, power-dense, reliable, and scalable switching power amplifier boards for plasma heating and control applications. We presented the Class E prototype, some samples of the wide bandgap semiconductor silicon carbide (SiC) JFET wafers, and a PCB board for a load switch at our booth at the ARPA-E Summit. A previous post on our website has links to our marketing and technical documents.

The photos below show Stephanie Thomas and Sangeeta Vinoth at the Registration desk of the ARPA-E-2022-Summit.

The picture of the Class E prototype that the PFS presented at the booth has been added to the ARPA-E Innovation Summit website.

Class E prototype build by Princeton University

More pictures of the ARPA-E Summit can be found here.

The Summit helped us to understand the Fusion industry’s needs for power electronics. We design, test, and qualify circuit boards as building blocks for various applications: short pulses, control pulses, and RF amplifiers.

A key takeaway was that there was interest in SiC and GaN wide bandgap semiconductor requirements for high power and high frequency. Researchers asked about radiation-hardened electronics, and some were also interested in high voltage electronics.

There were talks at the Summit about climate change, rethinking solutions for resilience, reliability, and security of electric grid infrastructure, and decarbonization.