About

Chatwood Labs

We’re developing Wake-Aligned Fuel Injection (WAFI), a control-first fusion research program that explores synchronizing fuel delivery with naturally propagating burn dynamics rather than relying on full-volume plasma confinement.

The work originated from propulsion-driven constraints, where mass, complexity, and controllability dominate design trade-offs. Those constraints motivate a different question: whether fusion performance can be governed by precise control of burn-front dynamics instead of increasingly elaborate confinement architectures.

The approach is speculative. The methodology is rigorous. We build first-principles models, run multi-dimensional simulations, and design experimental validation pathways to test whether phase-synchronized control can sustain fusion-relevant behaviour under reduced confinement requirements.

We favour rapid, evidence-driven iteration: test early, instrument aggressively, discard assumptions quickly, and scale only what survives validation.

What We’re Not Claiming

We’re not promising near-term net energy. We’re not claiming this approach resolves all fusion challenges. We’re not presenting a product roadmap or fundraising against speculative timelines.

This work is research: transparent, methodical, and willing to publish negative results. Progress is measured by falsification, validation, and improved understanding—not by hype or forward-looking guarantees.

Current Status

Active simulation and control research is underway, spanning reduced-order models through multi-dimensional MHD studies. Early results indicate regimes where burn-front dynamics propagate naturally, motivating continued investigation of phase-aligned control strategies.

Supporting infrastructure includes internally developed geometry tooling, diagnostics, and validation workflows. Selected components are released publicly to support reproducibility and external scrutiny.

Near-term efforts focus on stress-testing core assumptions, extending simulation time horizons, and preparing non-fusible experimental platforms to validate observability, control latency, and robustness under realistic noise and perturbation.

Why This Approach Matters

Fusion’s bottleneck has shifted. The challenge is no longer discovering fusion physics, but controlling it reliably, repeatedly, and at scale.

Conventional approaches frame fusion as a static equilibrium problem: maximize confinement, increase field strength, and hold the entire plasma volume at ignition conditions simultaneously. This demands enormous infrastructure, extreme stability margins, and tightly coupled failure modes.

WAFI reframes fusion as a dynamic control problem. Rather than forcing global equilibrium, it synchronizes fuel delivery with naturally propagating burn dynamics, sustaining localized ignition through timing and feedback instead of brute force.

If this approach works, it enables a simpler, more controllable architecture. If it doesn’t, the failure modes are explicit, measurable, and informative—and the results are documented accordingly.

Open Development

We release tools, validation workflows, and validated results publicly to enable peer review and collaboration. Proprietary control logic and active research remain under wraps until validated or protected. Transparency where it helps, discretion where it matters.