Q > 1, A Billion Times: Timing, Repeatability, and Recovery in Fusion Pulsed Power

Fusion has shown it can reach ignition. Commercial plants now depend on pulsed-power systems that can deliver on the order of a billion reliable shots, efficiently and from compact hardware. In this engineering review, we follow a single pulse from dielectric to capacitor to switch, examining how timing, shot-to-shot repeatability, recovery time, and lifetime are shaped at each stage. At that scale, the capacitor bank and the switch that fires it act as a single system. Switch timing affects how the capacitors age, and capacitor energy density sets how large the machine has to be. Three U.S. companies working across that system will show how co-design can lower cost, increase uptime, and shrink plant footprints.

• Peak Nano opens with the challenges facing fusion plants today, then starts at the dielectric. It will show how NanoPlex nanolayered films raise capacitor energy density above conventional BOPP, and what that means for bank size, inductance, and the thermal margin that sets lifetime at high repetition rates.

• E&P Technologies picks up from there, turning advanced films into qualified, fusion-grade capacitors. It will cover design for fault tolerance and voltage reversal, and the validation testing needed to prove shot-to-shot repeatability before deployment.

• Equilibria Power closes the loop with the switch that fires the bank. It will introduce its modular solid-state switching bricks, rated 2 kV and 1.4 kA per brick and scalable beyond 10 kV, and explain how digitally timed switching replaces spark gaps to improve timing precision, shorten recovery time, and reduce maintenance. 

• A moderated Q&A with all three presenters follows.

Photo credit: Sandia National Laboratories.