Amy Sprague
April 16, 2026
A&A’s Plasmawise Lab is among 25 projects selected for the first round of awards under Helion Energy's new university research program.
Bhuvana Srinivasan
A&A’s Plasmawise Lab, under the leadership of Professor Bhuvana Srinivasan, received funding through Helion's HERCULES program. HERCULES, short for Helion External Research Collaboration for Universities, Labs, and Enterprise Scientists, launched this year to connect the Washington-based fusion company with academic and industry researchers working on commercial fusion challenges. The 2026 awards span 20 institutions across the United States and United Kingdom, with more than $17 million committed through 2028.
Professor Srinivasan's project focuses on a materials durability problem at the heart of fusion device design: what happens to a reactor's inner walls when they're hit by high-energy fusion fuel. Wall materials in fusion devices can release particles and erode under bombardment by highly energetic hydrogen and helium plasmas.
The lab's work aims to characterize how this erosion unfolds in candidate wall materials across the 10 to 60 keV energy range, a regime where experimental data on sputtering yields is scarce. Using energy-dependent kinetic simulations, the team will model how plasma erodes wall materials and drives particle emission, generating information essential for predicting wall lifetime and plasma contamination in operating fusion devices.
"Fusion can only work at scale if we understand what the plasma does to the materials surrounding it," said Srinivasan. "This collaboration with Helion gives us the opportunity to close a real gap in the data and to do it in a context where the engineering stakes are immediate and concrete."
For more information, visit the Helion press release.