From Jyn to Lando

Every machine we build is an incremental step in learning; not just in science, but also in how to build it and how to operate it. “Lando”, our Gen 6.0 machine, is the latest in Avalanche’s fusion machine lineage: larger, faster, cleaner, more powerful with more capability and better instrumentation than any machine before.

Our previous machine, “Jyn”, helped us prove key concepts, and is still doing work for us. But Lando was built to take some of those lessons, and take a leap in capability.

A larger plasma volume allows us to have more atoms to fuse, more room and more ports for measuring devices, and more volume to experiment with plasma behavior. Lando can operate in regimes that Jyn can’t.

Any impurities in the plasma are spun up and heated, just like the fusion fuel we want to fuse. These impurities, however, will not have the energy to fuse, and they will suck up the energy meant for the fusion fuel.

Additionally, their orbits will be larger, their weight heavier, and their impacts with components be more likely and more damaging. Heavy impurities contact internal components, and spray off atoms like cannon balls hitting a sandy beach.

The sprayed off material then gets trapped in the plasma, further sucking the energy out of it, and creating a cascading effect of impurities and cooling. The cleaner, more pure the plasma, the better the performance.

We designed Lando to dump power into the plasma faster to spin it up. Spinning the plasma stabilizes it, centers it, and is a key part of heating it. Picture an old prop that needs someone to grab the propeller and give it a big yank to get it going.

If Jyn has Tom Cruise spinning it up, Lando has Dwayne Johnson.

Diagnostics are how we know what’s going on in the machine, it’s how we know how our plasma is behaving. Without knowing how it’s doing, we don’t know how to fix it.

Lando was designed with lessons learned from Jyn; we know where to look, and how to look better. We have 3 times the number of “eyes” on the plasma, and we have more angles to do it. This gives us a more accurate, more comprehensive view of our plasma, and helps us improve faster.

Electromagnetic interference, or EMI, can cause all kinds of havoc on sensors, instruments, and even actuators used for valve controls.

Lando isn’t just about the fusion machine changes, its upgrades include the infrastructure around it- simpler, cleaner, with all the “noisy” EMI equipment behind specially designed EMI shields, and the “quiet” equipment in its own space.

This may sound like a strange goal, or an odd brag, but when dealing with high voltage, things can stay dangerously charged in normal operations, and can have a variety of dangerous failures that hold charge long after they are supposed to be safe. Safely locking out equipment to “safe” it for nominal operations, and against all the things that can go wrong once took hours.

This meant that questions on calibration, or connectivity, or a minor vacuum leak could take hours to solve, and test operators were faced with the agonizing decision to keep testing because “maybe it’s fine” or should I spend hours safing the test cell to investigate.

While there have been many improvements over the last few iterations, Lando can be “safed” for personnel access faster than you can say “Irish Wristwatch”.

An underappreciated challenge is licensing fusion machines. Lando continues a solid record of rapid licensing where design plans are submitted and approved for operating our bespoke machines.

Lando designs required and got approval for 10,000,000,000 neutrons per second yield. Let’s goooo!