Vincent Fry is a mechanical 🏷️#engineer whose work at the 📝MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center was the electrical feed into the 📝Toroidal Field Model Coil (TFMC), the full-scale magnet built to prove the design 📝SPARC depends on. He is first author of "50-kA Capacity, Nitrogen-Cooled, Demountable Current Leads for the SPARC Toroidal Field Model Coil" (DOI 10.1109/TASC.2024.3354237), published in IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity in 2024 with eleven co-authors, 📝Theodore Golfinopoulos second to last and 📝Zachary Hartwig last.

Current leads solve a contradiction. Tens of kiloamps have to cross from room temperature into a 📝cryostat held near 20 kelvin, and the same metal that carries the current also carries heat the wrong way — every watt conducted inward is a watt the 📝cryogenics must remove. Fry's leads are nitrogen-cooled, rated to 50 kiloamps, and demountable, so the coil can be connected and disconnected rather than permanently plumbed into its test stand. In a 2021 MIT profile he described the same hardware as delivering 45,000 amps while adding under 20 watts of heating; he also oversaw the cable bus joining the leads to the magnet. The TFMC drew 40.5 kiloamps through leads of this design when it reached 20.1 📝tesla peak field on conductor on September 5, 2021. His paper belongs to 📝The TFMC Engineering Papers.