"After two successful years of INFUSE, it is clear that the program offers significant benefit to the fusion community," said James Van Dam, DOE Associate Director for Fusion Energy Sciences. "This new round of funding shows continued interest in the program as new companies continue to apply, looking to leverage the unique expertise and capabilities available at the DOE national laboratory system."

The funding will provide 7 selected companies with access to the world class expertise and facilities of DOE's national laboratories, which will equip their researchers to address critical scientific and technological challenges of fusion energy systems. The INFUSE program selected projects for one- or two-year awards between $50,000 and $500,000 each, with a 20% cost share for the private sector partners. The awards are subject to a successful negotiation of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement between the companies and the partnering DOE National Laboratories.

The 9 selected projects will take advantage of INFUSE's primary areas of focus: enabling fusion technologies; materials; diagnostics; modeling and simulation; and experimental capabilities.

Awardees selected:

• Air Squared Inc. (Broomfield, CO): Design, Test, and Evaluation of a Scroll Roughing Vacuum Pump with Filter and Vespel Tip Seals for Tritium Handling (Partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

• Commonwealth Fusion Systems (Cambridge, MA): Active Redox Control of Molten Salts for Fusion Blankets (Partnership with Savannah River National Laboratory)

• Commonwealth Fusion Systems (Cambridge, MA): Informing Layout and Performance Requirements for SPARC Massive Gas Injection (Partnership with Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory)

• General Atomics (San Diego, CA): Performance Testing of Low-resistance Demountable HTS Joints for Large Segmented Magnets (Partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

• HelicitySpace (Berkeley, CA): Simulation of the Helicity Drive Magneto-Inertial Fusion Concept (Partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory)

• Microsoft (Redmond, WA): Improving Plasma Control Capabilities in Magnetically-Confined Tokamak Systems with Transformer Neural Networks (Partnership with Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory)

• Renaissance Americas Inc. (Houston, TX): Phase Diagram of Li-LiH,D,(T) Mixtures and Implications for Tritium Retention and Extraction (Partnership with Savannah River National Laboratory)

• TAE Technologies, Inc. (Foothill Ranch, CA): Extending Operational Boundaries in the Advanced FRC (Partnership with Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory)

• TAE Technologies, Inc. (Foothill Ranch, CA): X-ray Diagnostic for C-2W FRC Plasma (Partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory)