Capital Equipment Systems Development

This was another situation in which development and completion had gotten seriously off-track by the time we are asked to come in and "fix things"; costs had escalated, multiple revised schedules missed and, overall, completion of even a working prototype was nowhere in sight. This was a DOE systems development and production contract related to the TOKOMAK Fusion energy project.

The equipment, shown here behind the team, is just one of many units developed as the extra high power, fast acting, AC to DC current conversion system designed to provide and manage the pulsed power current feed to the electrically-driven magnetic field coils that comprised the "Plasma" fuel "Energizing and Containment" system of the TOKOMAK Fusion Test Reactor - see next page for overview. Picture above includes the principle members of the shop-floor production team; a highly skilled team that was re-located with this project from So Cal to Nor Cal when the contract was novated to another company for completion.

This equipment incorporated bleeding edge technology to create a system that not only converted very high levels of power from AC to DC but did it in a manner that the output could be very rapidly controlled in response to real-time situations in the power absorbing end of the processes - the magnetic containment toroidal field coils.

Creating this capability at such rapidly changing high level energy demand levels had not been done successfully before. Successful accomplishment therefore required both a keen understanding of the various technological issues as well as a skillful team coach approach to bring the disparate working groups together productively. We were cited by DOE for the success realized in turning around the development and for finally delivering equipment more than viable to specification following upon the failures of five previous managers. In the course of this work, we not only managed the transfer of people, inventory and equipment from the original LA based company to the successor SF Bay Area systems development company but also managed the establishment of a systems production operation in Illinois and the installation of finished equipment at the final destination in NJ. It is worth noting that the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland today also uses many similar systems for the same purpose.

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