Thea Energy, MIT collaborate on testing stellarator magnet technology

Stellarator developer Thea Energy has announced that it is collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the testing and validation of an encircling magnet coil for the fusion firm's Eos stellarator. The work will take place at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) in Cambridge, Mass.

Thea's Eos stellarator design has a flattened, planar magnet architecture consisting of 12 encircling coils and about 300 programmable shaping magnets. This planar system offers a simpler, mass-manufacturable design that can reduce construction time, costs, and maintenance cycles, compared with previous three-dimensional stellarator magnet coil system designs.

MIT and Thea Energy, which was spun out of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in 2022, are confident that the cryogenic test facilities and expertise with high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets available at the PSFC are perfect for the project, in which Eos's magnet hardware will be tested at full magnetic field and full force. Zachary Hartwig, head of the PSFC Engineering Group, said that "PSFC's testing infrastructure is ideally suited to evaluate Thea Energy's encircling coils. . . . This collaboration aligns directly with our mission at MIT to advance scalable and efficient fusion technology, and our team looks forward to pooling our technical capabilities."

In addition to testing and validating Eos's coil, researchers will analyze the coil's efficiency under conditions similar to those that would be found in an actual fusion power plant. Data from this analysis will then be used to develop predictive models of the type that Thea Energy is using in its digital twin work.

Thea Energy announced in June that this it is collaborating with Nvidia, Synopsys, Argonne National Laboratory, and PPPL on developing a digital twin model for its planned Helios fusion power plant.

Still other work to be performed at PSFC will involve tests of the Eos magnet's resilience, conducted "to guarantee reliability and support high power plant availability," Thea Energy said.

Other recent accomplishments: The newly announced collaboration represents an extension of an ongoing partnership between Thea Energy and MIT and builds on other recent accomplishments by the fusion company. Thea co-founder and CEO Brian Berzin said, "This collaboration follows strong progress demonstrated by our recently published power plant design, and exemplifies how Thea Energy is leveraging decades of magnetic confinement fusion research."

Thea Energy recently was selected by the Department of Energy's Office of Science for financial awards through the department's Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) program for three projects: studying thermal cycling as a method for recovering radiation-induced performance degradation in HTS magnets, characterizing properties of boron-based vapor shields designed to protect plasma-facing components, and developing active control strategies to suppress magnetic islands in quasi-axisymmetric stellarators.

2030 and 2035 targets: Thea Energy hopes to have its large-scale Eos stellarator demonstration facility operating by 2030. The company expects to begin using its stellarator technology to produce commercial fusion energy at its Helios power plant by 2035.