Proxima Fusion CEO Francesco Sciortino and Christian Teichmann of Burda Principal Investments discuss how a small team can drive game-changing engineering in the quest for fusion energy, using novel methodologies that could serve as a blueprint for industrial transformation in Europe.
Proxima Fusion’s agile approach can act as a “blueprint for future engineering”, Teichmann notes in his introductory remarks. Spun out from the Max Planck Society, the fusion-energy company now operates with just 60 people across Munich, Zurich, and Oxford, but aims to revolutionize fusion by working on stellarators – “stars that are put into a magnetic bottle”, Scortino explains in a brief presenation that details Proxima Fusion’s technology.
The company’s rapid progress is due to a radical shift in engineering processes, he says. Instead of the traditional engineering model where physicists and engineers work in silos and lose time on system interfaces, Proxima works across disciplines and leverages automation in design.
“We start looking at hundreds of thousands of designs within a modern database system”, Sciortino explains. Using AI and simulation, the engineers “look at a continuum of solutions, which then we can morph between each other”, he says, pointing out that this AI-first approach enables rapid iteration on one of the world’s most complex technologies.
“We are training a device, a machine, to actually make the designs with us”, Sciortino emphasizes. “This still takes smart engineers that understand that domain, experts in each of these things. But our job is becoming to design the systems that then can be automated.”
The company’s origins bring together expertise from Max Planck, MIT, and Google X, with lessons drawn from Formula One racing and drone swarms. “When you try to compete in Formula One, you can’t actually test the car on the track very often”, Sciortino explains. “You have to simulate it.” And the winning will likely be “the one that is best at hardware, but it’s also the one that actually understands the product best and the one that can iterate the fastest.”
By simulating and testing fusion technology virtually, Proxima Fusion can “learn much faster”, Sciortino says, and save money by building hardware only when the simulations yield promising results. The company’s development process is also highly collaborative and leverages Europe’s pioneering academic work in fusion technology. “We have simply done more of this in Europe compared to the U.S., compared to China”, Sciortino emphasizes.
Watch the video for details on Proxima Fusion’s technology, the company’s roadmap, and when it expects to start producing clean energy with its revolutionary stellarator design.
