63rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics Poster Session VII: Fundamental Plasma Physics - Waves, Instabilities, and Shocks; Turbulence and Transport Phenomena; Single-Component Plasmas; MFE- High Field & Long Pulse Tokamaks: Pinch, Mirrors, Spheromak, and Other Magnetic Relaxation Time: 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM Helicity Drive is a novel fusion concept [1] based on peristaltic magnetic compression [2] of a plectonemic plasma [3] pre-heated by magnetic reconnection [4,5]. A plectoneme is a double-helical Taylor state [3,4] that combines the properties of a spheromak and a shear-flow-stabilized pinch. The principle is to merge a number N>>2 plectonemes to high ion temperature and then have the merged plasma transported and compressed by an externally imposed traveling peristaltic magnetic field. The triple product scales as N^(3/2) which gives an additional adjustable parameter for achieving fusion conditions and so reduces plasma gun constraints. Our development program consists of the ECLAIR experiment currently under construction in-house, and collaborations with Caltech [6] and UMBC [7] on the peristaltic compressor, with LANL on simulations, and with PPPL on high-power solid state switch technology. [1] S. You, AIAA Propulsion & Energy, AIAA-2020-3835 (2020) [2] P. M. Bellan, Phys. Rev. Lett., 43, 858 (1979) [3] E. S. Lavine, S. You, Phys. Plasmas, 28, 040703 (2021) [4] M. Brown, K. Gelber, M. Mebratu, Plasma, 3, 27-37 (2020) [5] E. S. Lavine, S. You, Phys. Rev. Lett., 123, 145002 (2019) [6] Poster: S. Pree, P. M. Bellan, et al. [7] Poster: N. Marin, G. A. Warznak, C. A. Romero-Talamas et al. This work is supported in part by DOE INFUSE and the Limitless Space Institute. Presenter: - Setthivoine You (HelicitySpace / Helicity Space Corporation) Authors: - Setthivoine You (HelicitySpace Corp.) - Seth Pree (Caltech) - Paul M. Bellan (Caltech) - Natalija Marin (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) - Grace A. Warznak (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) - Carlos A. Romero-Talamás (Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County) - Shengtai Li (Los Alamos National Laboratory) - Hui Li (Los Alamos National Laboratory)