Description of venture idea
Bob Mumgaard has emphasized the opportunity for
using Additive manufacturing for fusion-specific design elements such as first wall and vacuum vessel. Fusion has unique requirements for these components in terms of materials and heat extraction and operating environment. AM has developed generalized deposition tools. There is no framework for translating the two things together that bridges
- Fusion specific requirements 2)Optimization of structures for fusion environment given AM constraints—ML could help here
- Design of components for actual manufacture
- Production of components and
- Test of components in the relevant environment. Fusion people toy around with small scale stuff but its not systematic and it is sub-critical mass. The Nat. Labs do some but its not fusion specific enough, they want to do basic capability building, and it’s so hard to work with them. The AM manufacturers are excited but fusion is not a large enough market to support them investing lots of resources into it. The fusion community constantly talks about “it would be great if…” but doesn’t do anything about it. The Feds don’t fund it because it is too applied. One could build a really kick-ass team to tackle this problem and prove that this thing is possible in an “ah ha” sense and then it would certainly get picked up by others once shown to be transformatively useful. We have thought about doing this and work with Velo3D and Relativity Space but it’s not a big enough focus for us to really build a team around.
Andrew Seltzman argues that ML/AI is not actually needed, and that the Additive manufacturing constraints are “pretty mild and mainly involve supporting overhangs”.
Market needs this venture would address
Technical capabilities this venture might leverage
Business model
Team
Outstanding risks
References
Kyle Schiller has talked to some companies who have tried to work with Relativity Space and said they could not meet requirements. Renaissance Fusion in Europe is doing Additive manufacturing for High-temperature superconducting magnets, but that’s pretty specific.