Happy National Intern Day! 🎉
When asked if we’d hire interns, I said “no way”
At the time we had been in our facility for a measly five months and had a tiny team of eight trying to crack a Grand Engineering Challenge. So, when a teammate suggested hiring an intern, my reaction was “there’s no way we have the time or energy for that nonsense.” 🤦♂️
Fortunately, serendipity had other plans. I grudgingly accepted trialing an incredible candidate and she was AWESOME (when you’re done with that Ph.D., let’s talk!). We’re now in our third season of interns who are tackling all kinds of challenges with us:
Designing and building ultra-compact high voltage feedthroughs, developing in-vacuum pepperpot beam diagnostics, advancing electrode voltage stability monitors and controls, overseeing test cell network standardization and upgrades, running plasma simulations and visualizations, conducting high voltage tests (hundreds of thousands of volts!... in an incredibly well-designed and safe test facility), and producing fusion components in our machine shop.
Our interns have significantly contributed to our successes, with three past interns now part of our permanent team. Here’s to our summer class of ’24 – thank you for your hard work and dedication! 👏
#NationalInternDay
Founder of AE Space Technology Ltd.
3moWe've been studying the materials on the Orbitron reactor in the last two days. It is a well-forgotten method of inertial electrostatic confinement of plasma, which was proposed in the 40s of the last century. In the Orbitron reactor, the guys propose to use high-frequency oscillations of ions in a magnetic field to increase the efficiency of the fusion reaction. We are not sure how workable it will be and what the efficiency of this method will be, but we see the main disadvantage is that they will have neutrons at the output and they will have a huge number of them. For example to get 1 kW you would need to get at least 1.6E15 pieces with energies of 4 MeV. Here you would need a heavy blanket capable of absorbing these neutrons and converting their kinetic energy into thermal energy and then into electricity with huge losses. We propose a fundamentally different way - direct generation of electricity from plasma in water vapor through LENR process without neutron generation at all.