It’s a newly proposed fusion reactor prototype. It’s a stellerator type reactor. Together with the Tokamak type reactors these two are the currently most promising types to achieve fusion and generate more energy than they take to operate. While the tokamakak type is looks more symmetrical to the human eye the stellerator type have adopted a very weird looking shape where the symmetries are more hidden. The pictures are from this paper by mostly people from the institute who to date created the biggest stellerator type fusion generator Wendelstein 7-x. The proposed prototype ‘Stelaris’ is a lot bigger than the 7-x.
Bonus (with little context):
And heres a shematic view oft how it would look like from outside. Just like a donut.
Yeah I’m blind that’s four. Having fewer twists means more coils have the same shape so it’s going to be cheaper to build but of course that’s just one dimension of a massive, massive, design space. That’s practically all they’ve been working on since Wendelstein turned on and exceeded everyone’s expectations by behaving exactly as predicted. Wouldn’t make sense to build a thing that gets Q > 1 but can’t compete with at least fossil fuels, in fact that’d be rather embarrassing.
Oh that’s a good explanation for four twists. It sounds pretty likely that this was factored into the design.
On second thought, assuming equal spacing and same size of torus, less twists actually gives less repeated coils than more twists. An uneven number sounds bad for repeatability, though, and six might either be too much (ions don’t want to twirl that fast) or the coils get too complicated to still be amenable to proper mass production or something.