Danielle Fong 🔆
@DanielleFong • 62,669 subscribers
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i often describe lightcell energy 🔆 as building portable dyson spheres. harnessing the power of spectrally pure, chemically fueled, man made stars. and it's remarkable that within just a few months of starting experiments, we started achieving brightnesses greater than the sun ever shines on earth. (note, in large part because it is 1/600,000th of our sky -- a limitation that our lightcells, our "dyson spheres" do not have, wrapping around our emitter.) within a few months, in a garden shed in Canada, we achieved over 3 suns, over 300,000 nits (cd/m^2). within a few more months, in our lab in San Francisco, Jon, Steve and I achieved almost 7 suns, 670,000 nits. albeit destructively to the apparatus! at temperatures that eroded our cutting torch, our salt supply, our quartz tubes, or cracked. our sapphire. but this was in 2023! to a large extent, the development over the past couple of years, from mid 2023, to 2024, and all this year, was a steady effort to invent and develop, in some cases for the first time, for any team on earth, a materials stack, and everything relevant to to, to make high temperature parts for (a) continuous operation, and (b) that could tolerate the extreme temperatures and chemical environment necessary to vaporize and condense salt, in a continuous cycle, with no moving parts. we basically continuously tried the stupidest thing that could possibly work. some things, like "use table salt" worked out amazingly well -- though they had knock on requirements, like now you have to reform and condense sodium chloride in heat exchangers other things, we tried all the stupidest things we could think of, until we ran out of stupid things to try. Then we had to start trying clever things. Like, the material that we chose, alumina, which can handle the molten NaCl, and the temperature, and will not further oxidize, since it is already an oxide, is super hard, as in high stiffness. It has finite thermal expansion. You must therefore relieve the thermal expansion via curvature. You can ONLY POSSIBLY survive thermal gradients and cycles through curvature. This will requires you pioneering a field. Roll up your sleeves. It has been an epic journey getting this far! Of course, it is yet unwritten if lightcell energy 🔆 can even complete it, much less by the end of the year, but, i can certainly set a medium term goal: more than 1,000,000 nits (cd/m^2, or ~1kw/m^2). brighter than any firework. maybe achieved by New Years? that will be a hell of a firework, and a beautiful omen. 1000x brighter than HDR, 10x brighter than 1kW/m^2, 10 suns, the max brightness of a Sun, incident on the Earth's surface here's the twist: it would now not be cheating to use recuperation AND oxygen enrichment if you're burning green hydrogen from electrolysis, since you can set up to hold on the oxygen. it's for this reason, and many more that I'm excited to welcome my heroes, Terraform Industries / Casey Handmer to lightcell energy 🔆's SAFE and Cap Table. We're building the Yin to Terraform Industries' Yang of abundant hydrogen and synthetic fuels. We are excited to work on both the technology and the multi megascale to gigascale development sites -- energy campuses, power centers -- to build revolutionary, cost effective proving grounds for synthetic fuels and energy technology. Thank you so much. We are empowered and inspired by your belief and investment in us. We will make it count 🫡 Thank you again, as well, very much, to our many investors who we have not yet tagged, and will tag, on our THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING US ON SAFES WHILE WE WERE JUST A DREAM post, soon to come. Hope to paint funding announcements in a new, golden light!
Danielle Fong 🔆269,328 views • 6 months ago
hilarious. connected claude code (with mind palace) up with screenshots to see what's on my screen, and play along with me as an advisor in total war three kingdoms (characters & advisors important in this game) got voice communication~ working (!!) during the battle. what a trip
Danielle Fong 🔆151,367 views • 4 months ago
Claude and I got a live sodium atom simulation! lightcell energy 🔆 I've long wanted to be able to visualize what is really happening when a neutral sodium atom is excited in a flame or a bulb. Classical theory teaches that the single outer electron orbits the nucleus and full shells, and forms a dipole when this gets "wanged" but, physicists have long wondered, what does it look like when the electron gets wanged? is it like ringing a bell? i thought that this was the perfect time to really push what is capable of, in terms of building artifacts. grabbed zig to compile wasm and webgpu to make it super performant, and work with it for a bit and ran the REAL TIME-DEPENDENT Schrödinger equation on a 3D grid in a potential in the browser. and you can kick it! what!! it's soo beautiful... this is going on the website overhaul for sure here is the artifact. i don't endorse that it's exactly right, but i feel it is probably spiritually a good sodium simulation. it certainly rings my dipole!
Danielle Fong 🔆15,051 views • 14 days ago
showing lightcell energy 🔆's latest stability, power, clean air combustion, salt recovery breakthroughs LIVE to VC love seeing eyes light up! show it's ~silent, flicking off the fumehood fan the flame now so clean we don't need it on thank you investors for getting us this far!!! a true adventure
Danielle Fong 🔆94,893 views • 6 months ago
like here is an interesting circumstance. there's a bottleneck, so, power is almost 30 cents per MWh in one place, whereas just across the ridge, any power plant operating has to pay almost 30 cents to put that power on the grid. meanwhile, the poor geothermal plant at The Geysers, Eagle Rock, has to produce power at a negative realtime price, even though all around it utilities are buying at a positive price.
Danielle Fong 🔆234,869 views • 2 years ago
does anybody else see a bullet at the time of the first audible shot in this? it looks like it ricochets right off too, almost at the exact angle of repose and relative to the gun. so one agent says "gun", one removes it, and it fires? then other agents hear this and just unload -- which is indefensible. that's why they panic and say "where's the gun" "he has the gun" the gun was fired while it was in the custody of the guy who's running off. they know they fucked up in real time
Danielle Fong 🔆30,447 views • 4 months ago
i got my 165 fps deep book viewer (for "claudeberg", for running condors, iron and asymmetric) in pretty good shape to capture the close of the cash trade this Friday, and then a big battle on and through the 6400 Jun18' Future / ES Monday Expiry. what do you think of my innovation -- writing the deep book into the axis like a plotter? neat huh! tufte / victor would be proud i hope. contrary to other analyses, I think I can see the morale of the market through this lens, like an EKG, like the spine of the world economy, like a battle in total war. bloomberg terminal caps at 60 fps, $2500/month. but stacks like (apparently) sierra chart package/denali/cme bundle, quantower all-in-one/rithmic/cme level 2, or tradingview premium/cme come to $67 - $107 / month. maybe I can figure out how to serve free, $50 premium, $200 max tiers ... like everybody else in AI. I could offer a free tier with delayed quotes, and paid upgrades to present, and upgrades for trained time series foundation model predictions, monte carlo and confidence intervals, and upgrades for agentic strategy advisory or direct running. condor strategies are really given to "autopilot" especially with a researcher stack that can be informed by AI. a pretty clear example of how to charge money for AI services. AI that helps you make money, or even runs it directly. powered by lightcell energy 🔆
Danielle Fong 🔆11,966 views • 2 months ago
ran a hot plasma experiment at lightcell energy 🔆 on our new piece sintered out of Formlabs alumina 4-N 3d printed, ultra high temperature alumina ceramic. the swirly structure i designed did remarkable — condenses the salt and shoot it back into the flame core 🤔
Danielle Fong 🔆27,869 views • 1 year ago
made my first fired alumina print! lightcell energy 🔆 maybe i’ll call it a “lattice flame tokamak” 😉 this is where the flame occurs, held in place like a smoke ring. it’s supposed to be where the hot air and fuel mix, with channels pointing inward along a torus. the flame rolls around mixing fuel air and salt, like a rolling vortex, like a smoke ring. i constructed the geometry like this, it’s a triply-periodic minimal surface (TPMS). this divides a cylinder into two interlaced volumes with minimal material and the maximal surface area. it’s a “Schwartz-Diamond” type minimal surface with a bias, in cylindrical coordinates. the TPMS divides a space into two interlaced volumes. if you delete the material dividing these volumes then this is where the fuel and flames with mix and the reaction will take place. in addition, on average the channels will be pointed in along the torus throughout, canceling momentum and holding on to a recirculation vortex, there a flame will remain lit and where sodium can mix in via salt conducted in via wall surface tension, like a wick, and evaporation. the TPMS curves in all dimensions, so it is quite resistant to thermal stresses, can relieve stain along any of its curves. and it has thin walls so it can easily diffuse gases during debinding and sintering. had a small collapse in the center (probably a singularity in the model, cylindrical coordinates) but fired it anyway and it sintered beautifully! i used the latest version of Hyperganic hydesign for the geometry and a Formlabs Form 4 in Alumina 4N to do the printing. 💁🏻♀️☸️
Danielle Fong 🔆28,549 views • 1 year ago
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