At Commonwealth Fusion Systems, superconductors are our jam. By carrying electrical current with no resistance whatsoever when you get these materials cold enough, superconductors let us build the staggeringly powerful magnets crucial to our fusion power effort. We have thousands of kilometers of the stuff on hand.
So of course we sent a crew to the Applied Superconductivity Conference this week in Salt Lake City to hear what others in the field are up to and to share what we’ve learned.
Our Vice President of Production, Darby Dunn, was an ASC headliner. Over a thousand people packed a conference room to hear her detail how we’re revving our manufacturing engine faster, turning superconducting tape into machines called tokamaks that’ll generate clean, abundant, zero-carbon fusion energy.
This work is as applied as you can get for superconductors. Our 2021 TFMC test, which proved our fundamental tokamak technology worthy, used 270 kilometers (about 168 miles) of superconducting tape and generated a record 20 Tesla magnetic field. And now that we’re focused on building a full-fledged tokamak, called SPARC, Dunn showed how our magnet factory is steadily speeding up throughput to get the job done.
It’s a big job. SPARC requires about 10,000 km of superconducting tape. We expect to have all that in hand by the end of the year, Dunn said.
Our magnets use high-temperature superconductors (HTS), a class of materials discovered in 1986. They don’t need as much cooling and permit much higher currents than previous superconductors, but they can’t be drawn into wires like earlier metal superconductors. Years after their discovery, researchers figured out how to deposit a very thin HTS crystal inside a flexible tape. That’s what made our more compact and therefore more economical tokamak possible: higher electrical current means stronger magnetic fields, which in turn means a smaller chamber to house the fusion process.
It’s pioneering work, and we’ve figured a lot out. CFS staff at ASC this week are giving 12 presentations and scientific posters. Researchers at MIT — the university where CFS was born and still a strong partner — have another nine related to what we do.
Those presentations and posters cover everything from detecting superconductivity problems called “quenches” that can catastrophically damage a magnet; our work making the magnets now used in the University of Wisconsin’s WHAM fusion experiment; and findings from our soldering and welding processes. We have some proprietary technology, but we also share a lot with our peers and benefit from the independent feedback.
That’s just a slice of what’s going on in the world of superconductors. ASC 2024 also features research into superconductors involved in fields like electronics, quantum sensors, and transportation. Other talks delve into new superconducting materials and fabrication methods. There’s a lot to learn.
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