Plug Stress And Regime Gates For The Grid Case

Two physics gates, plug-coil stress and an operating regime far beyond experiment, underlie whether the burner can deliver firm power at all.

The gates beneath the grid promises

Every grid capability in this category, firmness, dispatch, ramp, black-start, presumes the burner sustains a D-3He burn. Two of the four honest gates concern exactly that. First, the plug coil is overstressed roughly 3 to 3.9 times at the design bore, so as specified it is not yet buildable. Second, the plug operating regime sits 166 to 830 times beyond any device operated to date, so its behaviour cannot be post-dicted from existing data.

The burner (MetroVolt) design uses a 26.49 T plug and 17 T throat to set up the confining potential. These are the fields the plug coil must withstand, and the regime figure reflects how far past demonstrated operation that confinement lies.

Why they come before the grid case

If the plug cannot be built as specified, or the regime cannot be reached and held, there is no firm output to dispatch. These gates are logically upstream of every grid capability described here. Stating them plainly is what keeps the grid case honest.

How the program addresses them

Closing these gates is the purpose of the design-and-simulation work now and of the ~2032 test unit. Magnet engineering must reach the required fields at acceptable stress, and experiments must probe the regime. Until then, the firm-power promises here are conditional on this physics.

Design-and-simulation finding, not a built-hardware result.