Wake-Aligned Fuel Injection (WAFI) is a control-first approach to fusion that synchronizes fuel delivery with propagating burn waves rather than attempting full-volume confinement. Our work spans three interconnected areas: building physics models that capture wave dynamics, designing control systems that respond to plasma state in real time, and developing experimental validation platforms to test observability and control response.
This is exploratory work testing whether a fundamentally different control architecture can sustain fusion burn with reduced engineering complexity and higher physical efficiency. The research is structured around simulation-driven iteration, early validation milestones, and transparent documentation of both successes and failures.
The Control Problem
Conventional fusion treats burn as a static equilibrium problem: maximize confinement, increase field strength, and hold the entire plasma volume at ignition conditions simultaneously.
But plasma is not static. Burn is not uniform. Energy does not propagate evenly.
Fusion is a dynamic system with unstable wavefronts, phase-sensitive reactions, and nonlinear feedback. Current approaches frame the challenge as achieving ever-higher confinement through brute force, using stronger magnets, hotter cores, and larger machines. This demands extreme stability margins, tightly coupled failure modes, and massive infrastructure overhead.
The problem is not that we don't understand fusion physics. The problem is that we're fighting the natural dynamics instead of working with them.
Plasma naturally propagates energy as waves. Burn fronts form localized regions of ignition, and temperature gradients create flow structure. The question is not whether these dynamics exist, but whether they can be controlled.
This is why fusion keeps failing: the failure mode is not physics. It's control.
The WAFI Approach
Wake-Aligned Fuel Injection (WAFI) reframes fusion as a propagating burn-wave control problem rather than a full-volume confinement problem.
Instead of attempting to hold an entire plasma volume at ignition conditions, we initiate a localized burn crest and sustain it through phase-synchronized control. Fresh fuel is injected directionally into the thermal wake trailing the burn front, a region where temperature gradients and flow structure already favor entrainment and ignition.
This approach seeks to sustain fusion through intelligent timing and feedback rather than brute-force confinement.
The architecture includes:
- Phase-synchronized fuel injection into the post-crest thermal wake
- Magnetic drift steering (ExB guidance) to maintain burn propagation direction
- Directional alpha energy redistribution to reinforce downstream ignition zones
The system operates without requiring full-volume ignition or continuous global equilibrium. Control becomes a matter of timing, phase alignment, and localized feedback, not holding the entire reactor at the edge of stability.
If this works: reduced engineering complexity, intrinsically fail-safe architecture, faster path to net energy gain.
If it doesn't work: we document why, publish the failure modes, and the physics community learns something.
WAFI is a patent-pending control architecture, under active validation through multi-dimensional MHD simulation and reduced-order modelling.
