Helion Energy to demonstrate net electricity production by 2024

[Skipjack]

Link to short Helion- video on Twitter:

Capacitors are cooking in the capacitor kitchen!
These windings have more than 2,000 layers of thin metallized plastic film.
Once completed in our winding machine, every winding undergoes rigorous electrical testing and further assembly before being installed inside the capacitor during the final assembly phase.

https://x.com/Helion_Energy/status/1767 ... 75758?s=20

Added context by David Kirtley on why they decided to more vertically integrate some of their manufacturing:

We spent a lot of time thinking about this. For capacitors, it’s manufacturing volume and speed. The history of the pulse capacitor industry is an interesting one driven by boom and bust cycles for large research projects.

[Skipjack]

Slow news lately, but here is a bit from Helion about their upcoming capacitor installation at Ursa:

HelionCapacitorRacks.jpg (99.75 KiB) Viewed 1205 times

[mvanwink5]

Helion has been working through Polaris construction issues as mentioned in their progress update:
https://mailchi.mp/helionenergy/polaris ... 060651cce5
It’s been a great start to 2024 for the Helion team. Every team member is ultra-focused on pulling all the pieces together for Polaris. Coils are assembled, sections are built, capacitors are on an assembly line – things are really moving! As of today, we continue to be on schedule to have Polaris built this year and begin operations and machine bring-up.

Compression coils are arriving and being assembled
For the last two years, our team has been working through supply chain challenges related to our compression coils. In the first two months of this year, we managed to overcome many of these challenges, using a multidisciplinary approach. Our engineers worked closely with our supply chain team, and our supply chain team worked closely with our machinists. We managed to overcome what could have caused a significant schedule delay (1 year or more!) for us, keeping the Polaris build moving forward this year.

Vacuum vessel material testing is providing viable manufacturing pathways
Polaris requires the largest quartz vacuum vessels ever made, which has been an extremely tough manufacturing challenge for our team. We have been parallel pathing a few different approaches for Polaris, each with its own technical or economical merits. The start of this year has proved these paths were right to try; we’re seeing positive results for two so far. Our test operators, engineers, and production teams have been putting in a lot of work to iterate on both options at the same time, and I know we are all excited to close in on a final solution. Facing hard problems with iteration in real time!

[Ivy Matt]

Why do the vacuum vessels need to be quartz? I mean, I like it that they are, but is there any practical advantage over solid metal vessels?

[mvanwink5]

Metal will conduct current when subjected to changing magnetic fields, & in this case the changing electric fields are massive.

As to why quartz? Quartz has many properties besides being non magnetic & an insulator, such as strength, ability to handle high temperature. As to more exotic requirements such as ability to handle neutron impingement, refurbishment ability, contaminants during operation, etc. there is likely to be a short optimized list that fits all.

[Munchausen]

Helion has publised an article on FRC instabilities:

https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/a ... abilities/

However, more detailed kinetic calculations that take the ion orbits into account, predict stability when certain conditions are met.2 Like spinning a top on your fingertip, rather than a flat surface, it is more likely to wobble and stop spinning.

[Skipjack]

Yeah, just saw that.

[mvanwink5]

However, based on our knowledge, we knew that an elongated FRC would still suffer from rotational instabilities if they weren’t stabilized using external mechanisms or operational controls, like injecting lines of charged particles (neutral beam injection) around the FRC to hold it steady,... or... pulsing in quick bursts, reducing the time to keep the FRC stable.

TAE vs Helion in a nutshell, and indeed, Helion is on a faster track to commercial fusion electric power.

[Munchausen]

TAE vs Helion in a nutshell, and indeed, Helion is on a faster track to commercial fusion electric power.

The unknowing layman may do the reflection that the faster you push in the energy needed to reach the required conditions, the faster the instabilities should evolve.

But I guess they have done their math on that issue...

[Skipjack]

TAE vs Helion in a nutshell, and indeed, Helion is on a faster track to commercial fusion electric power.

The unknowing layman may do the reflection that the faster you push in the energy needed to reach the required conditions, the faster the instabilities should evolve.

But I guess they have done their math on that issue...

The instabilities in FRCs are a factor of length and size, mostly.