Zapp Energy unveiled its latest fusion device Tuesday at a research conference in Long Beach, California. This is the latest in a series of devices the company has developed to bring fusion power to market.
The startup is competing with several other startups seeking to build fusion power plants that could power the grid in the early 2030s.
Zap’s Fuze-3 device fires pulses of plasma at the company’s headquarters near Seattle, and the results of those experiments will ultimately influence the design of the company’s future demonstration plants.
The Fuze-3 device was able to compress a soup of charged particles, also known as plasma, to more than 232,000 psi (1.6 gigapascals) and heat it to more than 21 million degrees F (11.7 million degrees C).
This pressure data shows a record of the type of fusion that Zap is pursuing, known as a shear flow-stabilized Z-pinch. Zap’s reactor uses electrodes to send electricity into the plasma, creating a magnetic field in the plasma. If the magnetic field is strong enough, it heats and compresses the plasma to the point where the particles in the plasma fuse.
While these numbers are useful for Zap as it pursues its goal of commercial fusion power generation, it’s worth noting that other companies have taken different approaches, so they can’t be directly compared to the performance of other fusion startups.
The realization of high-pressure plasma is essential for future fusion power plants. In order to generate more power than it consumes, fusion reactions must produce a so-called triple product, a number that describes the temperature, pressure, and duration of the plasma inside the fusion reactor. In other words, if you maintain a plasma hot enough and dense enough for a long enough time, you can generate electricity.
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According to Zapp’s own calculations, the company would need to increase the pressure of the plasma at least 10 times to reach a scientific break-even point, a goal that only one other fusion experiment has reached. The company said it is nearing an important third milestone proposed by Bob Mumgaard, co-founder and CEO of Zap competitor Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Zap was able to break the plasma pressure record by adjusting the reactor design and adding a third electrode. In the previous design, two electrodes were sufficient to heat the plasma, but the company was unable to achieve the required pressure numbers.
The company did not provide details about the new design in response to questions from TechCrunch. But spokesman Andy Freeborn said this would allow the company to use two power banks, giving it more control over how the plasma changes inside the reactor.
“The plasma chamber itself doesn’t look much different, but it operates very differently because it has two pulses of input power instead of one,” he said.
Zap said it is working on a new generation of Fuze devices and expects to launch them this winter.
