Modeling efforts in support of building Pacific Fusion’s magnetically-driven, pulsed-power machine for 100s of MJ yields

A talk by Patrick Knapp of Pacific Fusion.

Abstract: The Pacific Fusion Corporation, founded in 2023, is developing the targets and drivers needed to achieve high gain fusion for the first time in the laboratory and to simultaneously resolve significant hurdles to commercialization. We are planning to build a 60-MA pulsed power driver based on the Impedance-matched Marx Generator (IMG) technology, a driver technology with unprecedented efficiency. Magnetically driven targets, coupled to such an efficient generator, provide flexibility in design, low risk scaling, and a mature physics foundation. We will discuss the theoretical foundations that underpin our approach to fusion energy. To support our target design objectives we are developing and using the FLASH code. We have extensively improved and validated FLASH to support our mission. Additionally, to support experiments on our facility we are currently designing a state of the art diagnostic suite to enable optical, x-ray, and nuclear measurements of burning plasmas in the ~100 MJ regime. Our diagnostics are based on a foundation of statistical inference, allowing us to motivate designs based on their ability to quantitatively constrain key performance metrics.

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