It has appointed Professor Dimitri Batani from the University of Bordeaux to oversee a team of 19 researchers across 10 universities, with plans to expand this to 50 people, the company said today. Batani is part of the Intense Lasers and Applications Centre. 

 

He has worked on several demonstrations of hydrogen-boron fusion using lasers and the company says he will "significantly improve" its chances of actually taking the work from the highly theoretical to demonstrative to commerciality. 

 

It has also hired ANSTO CEO Dr Adi Paterson. 

 

He has experience in nuclear energy research and first-of-a-kind nuclear reactor engineering. He joins Guest Scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (University of Rochester) Prof. Tom Mehlhorn, Director of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (University of Rochester) Dr Mike Campbell, and laser engineering professor Prof. Dieter Hoffman. 

 

German start up man Lukasz Gadowski signed on after being lead investor on a significantly oversubscribed $4.6 million round earlier this year. 

 

HB11's work centres around laser fusion between hydrogen and boron. 

 

The company secured its intellectual property rights in Japan last February following recent grants in China and the US. 

 

The company is a spinout from the University of New South Wales, with the theoretical physics that underpin the applied tech developed by German-born Professor Emeritus Heinrich Hora.

 

He spent four decades investigating a laser-boron fusion approach at UNSW. 

 

Other fusion methods involve heating Deuterium and Tritium, both of which are expensive and radioactive, to temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun, around 15 million degrees centigrade. 

 

However HB11's tech, conceived by Hora, fuses hydrogen and boron together by using two powerful lasers whose pulses apply precise non-linear forces to compress the nuclei together.

 

The company recently released research in the November edition of journal Optical Engineering.

 

"Recent results show that this difficulty can be overcome by utilising the nonthermal radiation pressure that can be generated via chirped-pulse amplifier laser systems and can trigger the fusion of hydrogen and boron-11 nuclei, producing clean energy in the form of kinetic alpha particles, thus sidestepping nuclear radiation problems due to the aneutronic nature of the process," its abstract says.

 

Co-founder and managing director Warren McKenzie and Hora are both authors, with Alex Fuerbach and Ladouceur. 

 

HB11 Energy recently secured a $2 million Australian Research Council Linkage grant from Deakin University. It is planning a series of fundraises in 2022 to rapidly accelerate its growth and pace of R&D. 

 

It has been fundraising for a while and took in US$5 million last year via an oversubscribed private raising.