Carlos A. Romero-Talamás Ph.D, Associate Professor, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and IREAP
The Road to Fusion Power with the Centrifugal Mirror
The centrifugal mirror is a magnetic confinement concept that is remarkable for its engineering simplicity compared to other fusion concepts. It consists of a minimum of two circular electromagnets linearly arranged such that the magnetic field between them acts as a potential well that traps the hot plasma that can then be heated to thermonuclear conditions. Plasma heating and stabilization is achieved in the centrifugal mirror by imposing a radial electric field at the axis of the configuration, such that plasma experiences an azimuthal drift that is naturally sheared. This shear in turn leads to viscous heating and prevents the plasma from drifting radially outwards, achieving self-heating and dramatically better confinement than magnetic mirrors without rotation. The Centrifugal Mirror Fusion Experiment (CMFX), a research effort led by UMBC in partnership with the University of Maryland, College Park, has been funded since 2020 by ARPA-E to test the physics of centrifugal mirrors and demonstrate magnetic confinement at parameters relevant to sustained fusion production. The CMFX is the second-generation centrifugal mirror at Maryland, but the first one in the world to use superconducting coils, with a maximum field of 3-T. It is also the first one to achieve sustained operation for up to 10 seconds (limited only by the passive cooling of components). Temperatures, densities, and momentum confinement times in CMFX are now high enough to produce small amounts of fusion energy when experimenting with deuterium plasmas. The success in CMFX has spurred the ongoing engineering design of the next centrifugal mirror machine, led by the commercial spinoff of CMFX, the Terra Fusion Energy Corporation. This new machine will be aimed at demonstrating net energy gain in a small (1 – 10 MWe) modular system that can be used in industrial facilities that require resiliency, such as data centers, and will serve as an intermediate step for systems that can provide 100 MWe or more for regional power generation.