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Investigating the complex behaviour of plasma jets for fusion research
Product News Monday, October 19, 2026: Specialised Imaging Ltd.
Specialised Imaging reports how scientists from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London are using a SIMD32 ultra-high speed framing camera to investigate how dense plasma jets interact with magnetised and unmagnetized targets for fusion research.
The purchase of this SIMD32 camera was funded via the AMPLIFI Partnership, a UK consortium of academia and Industry, funded by EPSRC and First Light Fusion. This consortium is dedicated to solving the tough challenges presented by inertial fusion energy production, with the aim of one day providing a safe, secure and stable source of baseload power for the UK.
Simon Bland, Professor of Plasma Physics at Imperial College, said “Our research is focused on solving key scientific challenges of fusion energy. The Partnership is exploring the physics underlying First Light’s ‘Amplifier’ technology that could enable us to produce the extreme conditions required for fusion energy production on much smaller, cost-effective drivers than typically suggested. For this challenging application, the SIMD32 is the only framing camera capable of taking enough images at the speed and resolution we need”.
He added “For these experiments the SIMD32 was set up to record at 33 million frames per second to ‘freeze’ the behaviour of fast-moving plasma jets produced by the MAGPIE (Mega-Ampere Generator for Plasma Implosion Experiments) at Imperial College. The multiple frames of the SIMD32 enable us to explore both the production of shock waves as the jet reaches a target, and its dynamics later in time including the growth of any instabilities in the plasma. This information is then used to help validate some of the world’s most advanced magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations, enabling the Partnership to better model the behaviour of complex fusion targets.”
The SIMD32 ultra-high speed framing camera from Specialised Imaging is a double-shot multichannel ultra-high-speed camera capable of capturing up to 32 images at speeds of up to 1 billion frames per second without shading or parallax. Highly accurate timing and fully flexible intensified CCD sensors provide almost infinite control over interframe time, gain and exposure to capture even the most difficult ultra-fast phenomena. Comprehensive triggering adjustment and a wide range of output signals are controlled using the custom software package which also includes measurement and image enhancement functions.
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