Carl Weggel is a Board Advisor specializing in Tokamak / Fusion Generator Designer. As a 50-year, persistent advocate of the compact, ultra-high-field-tokamak route to commercial fusion energy, his expertise includes building and analyzing magnets, magnetic fields, and magnetic shielding. Magnet applications include fusion energy, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)/Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), shielded rooms, and particle beamlines. He saved Harvard University $53 million in magnetic shielding of the Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering Building.
He was a senior magnet design engineer at Massachusetts Institute for Technology from 1961-1966. Magnets were used for research, NMR, controlled thermonuclear fusion, and magnetic propulsion. This work included magnetic fields, Lorentz forces, stresses, strains (deflections), and thermal analysis. From 1973-1975, Carl was given the hone to design of the 14-tesla Toroidal Field (TF) magnet of MIT's record-setting tokamak, Alcator "C". Alcator “C” is the world's highest-field tokamak and one of the most powerful superconductors in the world. Designed, analyzed, and optimized the liquid-nitrogen-cooled, toroidal-field coils of Alcator “C” at a cost one-tenth of that of competitors.
From 1980-1984, Carl worked for INESCO, Inc. in La Jolla, CA. He was the program manager of 15 expert engineers in the magnet design department, where he designed toroidal-field coil with central field of 16 tesla: maximum field of 22 teslas. He provided stress analysis and gantry deflections for Loma Linda, CA's first proton therapy system. He examined the gantry's stresses and deflections. In addition, from 1988 to 1989, He worked as a mechanical engineer at Science Applications International Corporation, Inc. (commonly known as SAIC). He also worked at Intermagnetics General Corporation for 1 year.
In 1991-1992 at GE Healthcare in Florence South, NC, he was the senior magnet designer for MRI and electromagnetics. During that time, he helped design a super-open MRI magnet using niobium-tin wire and developed computer software for MRI machines. He has worked as a freelance magnet analyst for more than 38 years in Andover, MA, where he focused on magnet design, magnet analysis, magnet optimization, reducing fringe fields to negligible, minimizing cost of systems, materials selection, and computer calculus. From 2018-2020, Carl worked alongside his brother Bob at Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS)--a "spin-out" of MIT designing the magnets of CFS's SPARC (Soonest-Possible, Affordable, Robust, Compact) tokamak.
Carl Weggel graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. degree in physics and applied math. He has a master’s degree from Tufts University Graduate School of Engineering.