Modeling Direct Energy Conversion
The burner captures charged-particle energy directly instead of only as heat; modeling that conversion is central to its design.
What direct conversion is
Most power plants make heat, then convert heat to electricity through a thermal cycle. A D-3He fusion reaction produces most of its energy in charged particles, which carry electric charge and can be decelerated in an electric field to recover their energy directly. Direct energy conversion captures this without a thermal step for the charged-particle fraction.
Why the burner suits it
- D-3He reactions produce mostly charged particles, not neutrons.
- The burner has a neutron fraction of only 5.44 percent.
- A tandem mirror is a linear, open-ended geometry that lets charged particles stream to a converter.
- Recovered charged-particle energy avoids the losses of a thermal cycle.
What the model computes
Modeling conversion means tracking the energy spectrum of the escaping charged particles and the electric fields that decelerate them, then computing how much energy is recovered. It couples plasma physics, particle trajectories, and electrostatics, a multiphysics problem in its own right.
In the Kronos burner
The Aegis and MetroVolt burner is a D-3He tandem mirror built around this idea, with plug fields up to 26.49 T and a throat field of 17 T shaping how particles escape to the converter. The conversion model is part of the machine's design point.
Honesty
The burner is a design and simulation effort; no hardware net-gain claim is made before the breeder's first tritium around 2030, and the conversion figures carry their modeling assumptions and uncertainty.
Control coupling
Because conversion depends on the escaping particle flux, it is linked to plug control, which sets that flux.