Magnetised ICF from Melbourne, Australia
We fire two small fuel projectiles into each other and shape the collision so its energy focuses into a hot spot dense and hot enough to fuse. The design has been worked out in simulation. Physical testing comes next.
Vision
Solar, wind and batteries are winning the race for cheap energy. The harder job is firm power: electricity that is there through a still, grey winter week. Data centres need exactly that, and so will a grid two or three times today's size. Private investors have now put more than $14 billion into fusion, $4.5 billion of it in the year to July 2026.
The National Ignition Facility showed in 2022 that fusion fuel can release more energy than goes into it. Nobody has yet built a machine that makes more electricity than it draws from the wall. A growing number of companies are now working on smaller, pulsed machines to get there. Ours uses colliding projectiles.
Built in a factory
A Ciral unit is designed to be small enough to build on a production line. Costs should fall as more identical units are built, as they have for solar panels and batteries.
Our likely first customers are data centres. They run around the clock and need power that does not drop out.
Technology
How it works
Electromagnetic accelerators fire two small fuel projectiles at each other at very high speed. Getting both to arrive at the same point at the same instant, shot after shot, is half of the engineering.
Electromagnetic accelerators
The projectiles meet head-on and the impact drives shock waves inward. Their internal design focuses those shocks, the way a lens focuses light, so they converge on a small central region.
Shock lensing
That region becomes a hot spot, dense and hot enough to fuse. The fuel carries its own magnetic field, and a pulsed current then pinches the hot spot magnetically, holding it together for longer and cutting heat loss. Neutrons from the reaction go to a lithium blanket, which makes heat for power and tritium for fuel.
Magnetic pinchMost of the ingredients have been shown to work elsewhere. Converging shock waves created the hot spot behind the National Ignition Facility's 2022 ignition result. Sandia's MagLIF program showed that magnetised fuel holds its heat better. Magnetic pinches are one of the oldest tools in fusion. And in 2021, First Light used a projectile to initiate fusion.
Ciral commercial reactor concept
No separate target
The projectiles carry the fuel, so there is nothing else to make, position and hit for every shot.
Energy by motion
Lasers lose most of their input energy before it reaches the fuel. A projectile delivers its energy by motion, which in principle is far more efficient.
Two things to invent
A projectile that focuses the collision's shocks into a hot spot, and two accelerators timed to meet exactly, every shot.
Technology readiness: TRL 2.
Our results to date are from simulation. The in-house 3D MHD code is checked against a second, independent code, and the shock-lensing work is being written up for peer review. Next is a physical test of how the projectile implodes, compared shot by shot with the model.
Powered by MATLAB® and Simulink®
Ciral Fusion is a member of the MathWorks Accelerator Program.
Roadmap
Each test has to pass before the next one is funded. Today the design exists in simulation and the paper is being written. Phase A is next.
Our first physical runs, on existing test facilities. They show whether the model predicts how a real projectile behaves on impact. No fusion fuel is involved yet.
A bench-scale electromagnetic accelerator. We measure how much energy it puts into a projectile and how efficiently, then time two arms to meet.
Both arms fire into a collision chamber. We look for fusion neutrons, and for evidence that they come from a hot spot rather than a few stray fast particles.
Electromagnetic accelerator concept (Phase B)
The next experiment uses deuterium-tritium fuel and aims for scientific gain: more fusion energy out of the fuel than goes into it. A pilot plant that makes electricity comes after that.
Founder
Jax invented Ciral's approach and built the simulation engine behind it, which we call the Digital Twin. His background is in mathematical physics and machine learning, and he uses both to model the plasma and try designs in software long before anything is built.
LinkedInContact
We're raising now, in stages tied to the tests above. We'd like to hear from investors, research groups, government partners and data-centre operators planning for firm power in the 2030s.