The Helicity Drive Magneto-Inertial Fusion Concept

Helicity Drive is a novel fusion concept [1] based on peristaltic magnetic compression [2] of a plectonemic plasma [3] pre-heated by magnetic reconnection [4,5]. A plectoneme is a double-helical Taylor state [3,4] that combines the properties of a spheromak and a shear-flow-stabilized pinch. The principle is to merge a number N>>2 plectonemes to high ion temperature and then have the merged plasma transported and compressed by an externally imposed traveling peristaltic magnetic field. The triple product scales as N^(3/2) which gives an additional adjustable parameter for achieving fusion conditions and so reduces plasma gun constraints. Our development program consists of the ECLAIR experiment currently under construction in-house, and collaborations with Caltech [6] and UMBC [7] on the peristaltic compressor, with LANL on simulations, and with PPPL on  high-power solid state switch technology.

[1] S. You, AIAA Propulsion & Energy, AIAA-2020-3835 (2020)

[2] P. M. Bellan, Phys. Rev. Lett., 43, 858 (1979)

[3] E. S. Lavine, S. You, Phys. Plasmas, 28, 040703 (2021)

[4] M. Brown, K. Gelber, M. Mebratu, Plasma, 3, 27-37 (2020)

[5] E. S. Lavine, S. You, Phys. Rev. Lett., 123, 145002 (2019)

[6] Poster: S. Pree, P. M. Bellan, et al.

[7] Poster: N. Marin, G. A. Warznak, C. A. Romero-Talamas et al.