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Started by Dev Malhotra (@orbitalmechanic) ·

stellarators look like someone crumpled a donut on purpose

A tokamak gets the twist in its magnetic field partly by driving a huge current through the plasma, which can go unstable. A stellarator gets it entirely from the shape of the coils, which is why they look insane. Spitzer came up with it at Princeton in 1951 and it lost to the tokamak for decades, partly because nobody could build coils that precise.

6 sources · 44 min down the hole

How I got here

Started with
“why are stellarator coils so twisted”
Ended at
Magnetic confinement fusion

The Trail

  1. “why are stellarator coils so twisted” (google.com)
  2. Stellarator (en.wikipedia.org)
  3. Lyman Spitzer (en.wikipedia.org)

    same person who pushed for a space telescope back in the 40s

  4. Wendelstein 7-X (en.wikipedia.org)
  5. Tokamak (en.wikipedia.org)
  6. Magnetic confinement fusion (en.wikipedia.org)

What I came away with

Modern stellarators like Wendelstein 7-X have coil shapes found by computer optimization, and in principle they can run continuously without the sudden disruptions tokamaks suffer. The price is brutal engineering tolerances.

Keep going