Realta Fusion and research partners at UW-Madison are aiming to publish an early design for a commercial-scale fusion energy pilot device next year.
The Madison-based startup and partners at the university recently issued two studies detailing breakthroughs made by the company’s computational physics team.
These scientists have developed a unique software toolkit that will support further development of Realta Fusion’s CoSMo fusion systems, according to the announcement.
In one of the scientific papers, team leader Sam Frank demonstrated a “commercially viable energy gain” by the company’s specialized tandem magnetic mirror system. The startup’s findings show its system is on par with models for conventional confinement structures, the release notes.
The announcement references the “long-held opinion of many of the world’s leading plasma physicists that the magnetic mirror could be the most commercially relevant” way to approach fusion energy production.
The second recent paper from Realta Fusion was authored by Aaron Tran, a research associate in the university’s physics department. It used the same toolkit, showing it can identify and manage instabilities that have been seen as a possible hurdle for the magnetic mirror approach that Realta Fusion is advancing.
While this specific form of plasma instability has previously been difficult to model, the toolkit enables this step and supports potential engineering fixes. The tools for modeling such instability didn’t exist, “so we built them ourselves,” Frank said.
“This helps us better understand specific issues like plasma instability,” he said in a statement. “We have to understand instabilities so we can chase them down and stop them in their tracks. We cannot be afraid of them, ignore them, and hope that they go away.”
These research findings will be used in a coming paper that will lay out the full pre-conceptual design for a pilot fusion device called Hammir. It’s expected to be published in 2026.
Derek Sutherland, vice president of research and development for the startup, says the work laid out in the studies “represents a significant advancement” toward designing a pilot plant. The company is currently working on further optimizing its design to improve energy yield, he siad.
“These computational tools we’re developing are being validated against our experimental data, which gives us confidence in using them to design our next-stage devices,” he said. “Our tools are being grounded in reality, as they should be.”
The latest development comes after the company in May announced it had raised a $36 million funding round for its commercialization efforts.
See the release.
