Igniting the future: How CFS is advancing commercial fusion with Digital Twins and AI from Siemens and NVIDIA
Imagine a future powered by clean, nearly limitless energy – fueled by the same process that powers the stars.
Suddenly, the phrase “reaching for the stars” has new meaning.
The idea of fusion energy is not new. This is not science fiction. In fact, fusion has been talked about for decades. Only this time around it’s a whole new ball game enabled by a new set of technological breakthroughs.
Today, there’s one company that best exemplifies this new thinking. Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is developing a commercial fusion energy plant powered by high-temperature, superconducting magnet technology. Siemens is collaborating with CFS and NVIDIA to accelerate CFS’ progress towards commercial fusion.
At this year’s CES in Las Vegas, CFS was on stage with Siemens CEO, Roland Busch, discussing the very real possibility of accelerating the development of commercial fusion. And just how will this be accomplished? It’s an approach that involves a sophisticated Digital Twin of CFS’s SPARC fusion machine, supercharged by NVIDIA’s advanced AI and Siemens’ cutting-edge digital engineering technology.
This is more than building a state-of-the art fusion machine. It’s about revolutionizing how to design, build and operate complex machines that will power our future with unprecedented levels of sustainability.
How each company contributes to fusion’s future
This collaboration leverages each company’s specialized expertise to tackle one of humanity’s grandest challenges.
Here’s how the collaboration breaks down:
Commonwealth Fusion Systems: Driving the fusion breakthrough
CFS is the visionary force behind the SPARC tokamak, the machine at the center of this innovation. As the leader in commercial fusion development, CFS provides the deep scientific and engineering expertise. CFS is leveraging advanced digital and AI technologies to its mission, integrating Siemens’ solutions into workflows and leveraging NVIDIA technologies to optimize SPARC’s design and operation.
The goal is clear: To bring clean, abundant fusion energy to the grid, at scale, as soon as possible.
Siemens: The digital engineering backbone
At the heart of any complex engineering project lies robust design and data management. Siemens provides the foundational elements for the SPARC Digital Twin. Siemens Designcenter NX delivers advanced product development capabilities that help the CFS team create the precise 3D geometry and assembly drawings of the fusion machine. Complementing NX is Siemens Teamcenter PLM, which acts as the central hub for engineering project management, aggregating real-time data from every stage of manufacturing, engineering, operations and maintenance.
The Siemens Xcelerator portfolio ensures that every piece of information about SPARC will be seamlessly integrated and accessible within the comprehensive Digital Twin.
By connecting Siemens Xcelerator with NVIDIA AI visualization libraries, we’re demonstrating that end-to-end digital workflows aren’t just efficient, they’re transformative.”
-Del Costy
President & Managing Dir., Americas, Siemens Digital Industries Software
NVIDIA: Unleashing AI and immersive simulation
NVIDIA accelerated computing will help power fusion AI models that CFS and its partners are developing. NVIDIA Omniverse libraries drive a Digital Twin that physicists can use to compare real-world experimental data with simulation predictions. It’s where the geometric data from Siemens meets the complex world of physics simulations, allowing for real-time visualization and analysis.
But the true gamechangers are NVIDIA AI technologies. Traditionally, simulating the intricate plasma physics within a fusion machine could take weeks on supercomputers. However, CFS and NVIDIA are collaborating with the fusion ecosystem to train AI surrogate models that can approximate these same simulations in milliseconds. This dramatic reduction in time means engineers can iterate designs, test hypotheses and optimize the fusion machine dramatically faster than before. The long-term vision includes developing AI agents that will assist in the real-time operation of SPARC.
With the help of Siemens NX software and NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, CFS will be able to create a high-fidelity Digital Twin of SPARC and accelerate its engineering to achieve commercial fusion power.”
-Rev Lebaredian
VP, Omniverse and Simulation Technology, NVIDIA
Solving fusion’s toughest challenges, faster
This collaboration directly addresses critical bottlenecks in fusion energy development. Solving these challenges will help serve as the very foundation as the entire industry moves forward.
Accelerated Experimentation: The ability to reduce simulation times from days to weeks to milliseconds is transformative. As Bob Mumgaard, CEO and Co-founder of CFS puts it, “This partnership compresses years of manual experimentation into weeks of virtual optimization.” This rapid iteration is key to speeding up design cycles and discovering optimal solutions.
Mastering Complexity: Once operational, SPARC will generate enormous amounts of data. The Digital Twin will provide a digital workflow (lead by digital threads) that will aggregate millions of data points to accelerate CFS’ ability to rapidly analyze the results and test hypotheses.
Optimized Design and Operation: Understanding critical elements like plasma heat, thermal profiles and the material science of plasma-facing walls is vital. The Digital Twin will model these aspects and provide integrated insights to designers to inform future machine concepts.
CFS will be able to compress years of manual experimentation into weeks of virtual optimization using the digital infrastructure developed by NVIDIA and Siemens.”
-Bob Mumgaard
CEO and Co-founder, CFS
A glimpse into the future: The vision ahead
This collaboration isn’t just about a single SPARC machine. It’s about laying the groundwork for a new era of energy and industrial innovation. The overarching goal is to accelerate the commercialization of fusion energy, bringing a clean, safe and virtually limitless power source to the earth’s energy grid.
Siemens CEO Roland Busch emphasizes that these end-to-end digital workflows are not merely efficient but transformative, representing nothing less than “the future of industrial engineering.”
This is an ongoing journey, a real-world fusion story that will continue to evolve. The Digital Twin and its AI models will constantly improve, leading to continuous innovation and the promise of AI assisting in real-time design and operations. It’s a testament to how AI doesn’t just enable fusion but actively propels us into a more sustainable and intelligent age.
Read the official CFS, Siemens and NVIDIA press release.
Still curious? Check out the CFS SPARC web page. And here’s a blog from CFS (with some pretty cool animation).
We are truly at a turning point. The possibility of commercial fusion makes the future look very bright indeed.
