Digital twin to fast-track Tokamak Energy’s next fusion results

Tokamak Energy will use a new digital twin computer software programme for upcoming tests when its record-breaking fusion machine returns to plasma operations.

The Oxford-based company’s ST40 will mirror experiments simulated virtually in the modelling programme SOPHIA to greatly improve efficiency and accelerate progress on the company’s roadmap to commercialising clean, secure and affordable fusion energy in the 2030s.

It means Tokamak Energy scientists and engineers will get maximum gains from every experiment without needing to test multiple scenarios in the physical machine, removing human error and fast-tracking results.

ST40 is the first privately-owned fusion machine to reach a plasma temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius, six times hotter than the centre of the Sun and the threshold for commercial fusion.

For 2024, Tokamak Energy is aiming to break the record it holds for highest triple product, a widely recognised industry measure of plasma density, temperature and confinement, collectively a key measure of progress on the path to putting fusion energy on the grid.

Dr Mike Porton, Tokamak Energy’s Chief Engineer, said: “The world desperately needs a secure supply of clean and affordable energy to meet rising demand and address climate change. Our new tokamak simulator SOPHIA will maximise gains from experimental goals, reduce risk and help perfect plasma scenarios quicker than previously thought possible.

“Successful experiments tested virtually by SOPHIA will go forward to ST40 for real, producing measurable, publishable, verifiable, physical results to accelerate our research and development productivity. It is a huge breakthrough in cutting timelines on Tokamak Energy’s mission to validate power plant designs and deliver commercial fusion in the 2030s.”

SOPHIA, Greek for wisdom, was first trialled in late 2023 to help Tokamak Energy understand and develop high-performance diverted plasma scenarios in its high field spherical tokamak.

In a diverted configuration, the magnetically confined hot gas is separated from the wall and its exhaust is directed to a dedicated divertor region that extracts heat and particles, keeping the core plasma cleaner and therefore significantly improving overall performance.

Physics, diagnostics, actuator and control modelling programme SOPHIA, designed in-house at Tokamak Energy, has since been upgraded and will be fully integrated into ST40 plasma operations for 2024. It can be programmed to run multiple simulations at once and predicted results have been proven to mirror actual experiments, ensuring ST40 tests do not breach machine limits and cause plasma disruptions.

SOPHIA is also used for team training and is expected to be developed further for future devices on the company’s roadmap to delivering commercial fusion power.

Last week, Tokamak Energy signed an agreement with the Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the United States’ bold decadal vision for delivering commercial fusion. The DOE’s $46 million milestone-based fusion development program was established to support private companies in bringing fusion toward technical and commercial viability.

Selected companies will now team with national laboratories, universities, and others to address major technical and commercialisation milestones for the successful design of a fusion pilot plant.

Tokamak Energy, founded in 2009 as a spin-off from UK Atomic Energy Authority, will demonstrate net power from its pilot plant in the mid-2030s, paving the way for globally deployable clean and secure fusion energy

Publications

McNamara, S.A.M., et al., Achievement of ion temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees Kelvin in the compact high-field spherical tokamak ST40. Nuclear Fusion 63, 054002 (2023).

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Chris Martin

Dr Chris Martin

Chairman

Chris Martin is the Tokamak Energy Chairman and a non-executive director. He has considerable international experience successfully growing businesses in the healthcare, energy and environmental sectors. He co-founded ADC Therapeutics in 2011, after launching Zynlonta for blood cancer and leading a NYSE IPO, he stepped down as CEO in May 2022.

He was also Co-Founder of Spirogen Ltd and its Chief Executive Officer leading up to the company’s sale to AstraZeneca in October 2013. Chris has a DPhil from Oxford and an MBA from IMD, and is a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers and a Sainsbury Management Fellow.

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Warrick Matthews

Warrick Matthews

Chief Executive Officer

Warrick Matthews joined Tokamak Energy in January 2023. He leads the business and is building the commercial partnership strategy to scale Tokamak Energy, a world leader in two transformative technologies – fusion energy and High Temperature Superconductor magnets.

Warrick leads a team of over 250 people with experts from around the world. It combines world-leading scientific, engineering, industrial and commercial capabilities, with the goal of delivering clean, secure and affordable fusion energy in the 2030s.

Prior to Tokamak Energy, Warrick worked at Rolls-Royce for 24 years where he held a variety of customer-facing and operations leadership roles and was most recently Chief Procurement Officer for the Civil Aerospace division.

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David Kingham

Dr David Kingham

Executive Vice Chairman

David is our Executive Vice Chairman and former Chief Executive Officer. He is an integral part of our management team.

A trained theoretical physicist, he was one of the founders of the business and became our CEO in 2009 having spent almost two decades as the Managing Director of Oxford Innovation, a company that has supported hundreds of successful new technology ventures.

David successfully led Tokamak Energy through three investment rounds and worked with colleagues and investors to mastermind an ambitious, yet achievable, business plan to drive innovation and accelerate the development of our fusion energy mission.

David’s ample experience has proved invaluable in growing and directing the business. He is a former Chairman of the R&D Society and has been a director at various high technology and knowledge-based start-ups. He has also won and delivered major contracts aimed at supporting innovation, entrepreneurship and business growth at regional and international levels.

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Mikhail Gryaznevich

Dr Mikhail Gryaznevich

Chief Scientist

Mikhail is a founder of Tokamak Energy and our Chief Scientist. He is a leading global authority on tokamaks and has performed experiments on 16 different tokamak during his distinguished career.

After graduating with an Honours Diploma in Plasma Physics from the Leningrad University in his homeland, Mikhail earned a PhD in Plasma Physics and Nuclear Fusion from the USSR Academy of Science. In 1990, he joined the Culham Laboratory in Abingdon and has been responsible for leading experimental programmes, preparing and performing experiments, designing, constructing and operating tokamak systems and diagnostics, as well as supervising students and scientific and engineering personnel.

Mikhail is a Visiting Professor at Imperial College in London and an editorial board member for the Plasma Science & Technology Journal and the Open Plasma Physics Journal. He regularly lectures about the physics behind spherical tokamaks at universities and plasma physics schools across the world.

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Erik Bonino

Non-Executive Director

Erik Bonino joined Tokamak Energy as a Non-Executive Director in January 2021.

Erik has over 30 years’ international experience in the energy sector in operations, major projects and technology development.

Erik is a mentor to Imperial College London’s IVMS program where he advises a number of technology start-up companies in energy and related fields.

Erik retired from Shell in August 2018, where he held the roles of UK Country Chair and Executive Vice President of Downstream Technologies. His portfolio included Shell’s Catalyst and Licensing business through which he developed Shell’s bio-fuel technology. He also established Shell’s Global technology campus in Bengaluru, India. Prior to this he served as the Executive Vice President of Project and Engineering Services with responsibility for the delivery of new production facilities, technology and technical support for both the Upstream and Downstream Businesses.

Prior to joining Shell in 2002 Erik spent 18 years in the oil and gas industry, first in the leadership of major capital projects and then in management consulting as Vice President of Energy and Utilities with Cap Gemini Ernst and Young. As a senior consultant he has advised many blue-chip energy companies on operational performance improvement and has led utility privatisations in Europe.

Erik holds an MBA from Cranfield School of Management and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Electrical Engineering from Southampton University. He is a Fellow of the Energy Institute.

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David Gray CBE

Non-Executive Director

David Gray joined Tokamak Energy as a Non-Executive Director in October 2019.

He has spent 30 years working in financial markets, mainly with HSBC, and has extensive experience of the energy sector including advisory roles on the initial privatisations of British Gas and the electricity sector.

He is currently Chair of Mutual Energy and the Energy Innovation Centre (EIC). Mutual Energy is an energy infrastructure company based in Northern Ireland. It owns the electricity and gas interconnectors between Scotland and Northern Ireland together with gas transmission assets in both countries. The EIC acts as an intermediary between innovators and energy network companies to optimise the effective adoption of innovative solutions by the industry.

David was previously Chair of the Gas & Electricity Markets Authority (the board of the energy regulator, Ofgem) from 2013 – 2018 and was Ofgem’s Managing Director, Networks from 2003 – 2007. After leaving Ofgem in 2008 he was a member of a panel advising the Department for Transport on the economic regulation of airports and subsequently led a review of Ofwat on behalf of DEFRA and the Welsh Assembly Government. He was also a non-executive Director of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) from 2009 to 2019.

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David Harding

Sir David Harding

Non-Executive Director

Sir David Harding joined Tokamak Energy as a non-executive Director in March 2022. He is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Winton Group Limited.

Sir David graduated from Cambridge University with a First Class Honours degree in Natural Sciences specialising in Theoretical Physics. He then embarked on a career in the analysis of futures and trading markets, which led him to co-found Adam, Harding and Lueck Ltd in 1987 with Martin Lueck and Michael Adam. AHL rapidly became one of the leading commodity trading advisors in the UK and was acquired by Man Group plc in 1994. Sir David left Man Group plc in 1996 and in February 1997, he co-founded Winton with Martin Hunt and Osman Murgian with a commitment to applying financial mathematics and empirical scientific research to creating and developing trading systems for the financial markets.

Sir David has endowed a number of significant projects principally supporting the funding of basic science research in the UK and around the world, including the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge and the Winton Bio-informatics Suite at the Francis Crick Institute. In 2019, Sir David’s foundation gave US$130 million to Cambridge University.

He sits on the Advisory Board of the Royal Society and the University of Cambridge Development Board, and is an honorary Fellow of the Science Museum, and of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.

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Warrick Matthews

Warrick Matthews

Chief Executive Officer

Warrick Matthews joined Tokamak Energy in January 2023. He leads the business and is building the commercial partnership strategy to scale Tokamak Energy, a world leader in two transformative technologies – fusion energy and High Temperature Superconductor magnets.

Warrick leads a team of over 250 people with experts from around the world. It combines world-leading scientific, engineering, industrial and commercial capabilities, with the goal of delivering clean, secure and affordable fusion energy in the 2030s.

Prior to Tokamak Energy, Warrick worked at Rolls-Royce for 24 years where he held a variety of customer-facing and operations leadership roles and was most recently Chief Procurement Officer for the Civil Aerospace division.

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Thomas Pfisterer

Non-Executive Director

Thomas is Director of Direct Investments of the WILD Family Investment Office.  He joined the Family Office following the sale of WILD Flavors GmbH, one of the world’s leading suppliers of natural ingredients to the food and beverage industry, for which he served as Head of Strategic Development directing the company’s global M&A activities since October 2011.  Thomas currently serves on the Boards of Directors of several other companies, including TTTech Computertechnik AG.  He holds a Master’s in Finance from Cambridge University, UK, as well as a BA in Economics and a BA in Business Administration, both from University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

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Daniel Freeman

Non-Executive Director

Daniel Freeman leads Dorilton Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in advanced technology companies. He has more than 20 years’ experience investing across a range of geographies and asset classes at firms including Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank, and Eton Park Capital Management. Daniel holds an AB in East Asian Studies from Princeton, was a Fellow at the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University Centre for Chinese and American Studies, and received an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

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Warrick Matthews

Warrick Matthews

Chief Executive Officer

Warrick Matthews joined Tokamak Energy in January 2023. He leads the business and is building the commercial partnership strategy to scale Tokamak Energy, a world leader in two transformative technologies – fusion energy and High Temperature Superconductor magnets.

Warrick leads a team of over 250 people with experts from around the world. It combines world-leading scientific, engineering, industrial and commercial capabilities, with the goal of delivering clean, secure and affordable fusion energy in the 2030s.

Prior to Tokamak Energy, Warrick worked at Rolls-Royce for 24 years where he held a variety of customer-facing and operations leadership roles and was most recently Chief Procurement Officer for the Civil Aerospace division.

Close

Warrick Matthews

Warrick Matthews

Chief Executive Officer

Warrick Matthews joined Tokamak Energy in January 2023. He leads the business and is building the commercial partnership strategy to scale Tokamak Energy, a world leader in two transformative technologies – fusion energy and High Temperature Superconductor magnets.

Warrick leads a team of over 250 people with experts from around the world. It combines world-leading scientific, engineering, industrial and commercial capabilities, with the goal of delivering clean, secure and affordable fusion energy in the 2030s.

Prior to Tokamak Energy, Warrick worked at Rolls-Royce for 24 years where he held a variety of customer-facing and operations leadership roles and was most recently Chief Procurement Officer for the Civil Aerospace division.

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Warren East

Warren East

Non-Executive Director

Warren East CBE, previously CEO of Rolls-Royce and Arm, joined Tokamak Energy as Non-Executive Director in May 2023.

After 11 years at Texas Instruments, Warren joined Arm in 1994, was appointed to the board in 2000, and was CEO from 2001 to 2013. Under his leadership, Arm became the world’s leading semiconductor IP licensing company.

In 2014, Warren became a non-executive director of Rolls-Royce Holdings and chair of the board’s technology committee. As CEO from April 2015, he led Rolls-Royce through the Covid-19 pandemic impact on global aviation and championed the strategic shift to net zero. After seven years leading Rolls-Royce, he retired from the company on 31 December 2022.

In April 2024, Warren was appointed Chair of The UK’s National Air Traffic Service (NATS), taking over as chairman from 1 September 2024.

Warren is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering, a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society and a companion of the Chartered Management Institute. Warren has a degree in Engineering Science from Oxford University, an MBA from Cranfield, and honorary doctorates from Cranfield and Newcastle Universities. With his wife, he established The Relithan Charitable Trust, supporting science education. He was made CBE in 2014 for services to Engineering and Technology.

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Rory Scott Russell

Non-Executive Director

Rory Scott Russell is head of Venture Capital at East Innovate, the venture capital arm of East X, the quantitative commodity technology and research company. East Innovate invests and partners with early-stage research-driven start-ups addressing the global energy challenge. He is the founder and co-founder of several technology companies, following an early career in international energy. He has a BSc in Computer Science and Al from the University of Edinburgh.

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