If you found us through the fusion world, you probably think of Woodruff as a ‘Fusion Head’ and Woodruff Engineering as a fusion supply chain company. We’ve shipped hardware to multiple fusion developers across tokamak, stellarator, and inertial confinement programs. That reputation is real, and we’re proud of it.
But here’s something that might surprise you: fusion has never been the only thing we do, and there have been stretches where it wasn’t even the main thing. Woodruff Engineering has been in business for over 20 years — founded in Seattle in 2004 (as Woodruff Scientific) with our first DOE SBIR awards that same year — and we’ve been building magnets and power supplies for defense, national labs, and industrial-scientific customers ever since. The physics community knows us one way. The rest of our customer base knows us rather differently.
This post is about that broader story, and why we think the full picture matters — for us, and perhaps for you.
The Funding Cycle Problem
Anyone who has worked in or around fusion research knows the rhythm. Funding surges, then contracts. Programs get cancelled or restructured. Timelines slip by years. Through the 2010s, government fusion funding increasingly concentrated on ITER and the large international program — a sensible bet on one horse, perhaps, but one that left a lot of smaller domestic fusion supply work without a buyer. If your entire business depended on that pipeline, those years were difficult.
We lived through that. (We actually designed diagnostics for ITER and leaned into simulations). And what it forced us to do — return to our roots in defense and industrial-scientific work — turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to us as an engineering organization.
The reason is straightforward: the problems that adjacent markets bring you are genuinely different from fusion problems, and solving them makes you better. Pulsed power for directed energy weapons is not the same engineering challenge as a tokamak power supply, even if some of the components look similar. Magnetic field cancellation for a quantum sensing lab is not the same as coil design for plasma confinement. The specifications are different, the failure modes are different, the customers care about different things.
Solving diverse problems, over and over, with real hardware that has to work and be delivered on schedule, builds a depth of capability that no single-market focus can replicate.
What “Diversified” Actually Looks Like for Us
Today, Woodruff Engineering serves three distinct markets with a common technology core: pulsed power and magnets.
Defense and government has been part of our story for fifteen years. We hold relationships at LANL, Sandia National Laboratories, and ORNL that go back over a decade. We’re an ITAR-compliant US manufacturer with SBIR program experience and a track record in high-energy physics and pulsed power for national lab applications. The WE-OR-35 pulsed power supply series, which has passed full Factory Acceptance Testing, was shaped in large part by the demanding specifications of this customer base.
Industrial-scientific covers a range of customers that people outside the sector might not immediately associate with us: particle accelerator facilities (SNS, and the SLAC supply chain), academic plasma and beam physics groups, and industrial users of electromagnetic forming, pulse welding, and impulse magnetising — automotive and aerospace manufacturers who need to move metal or magnetise components at very high field and current. Repeat-purchase production equipment, delivered to schedule, into facilities that can’t afford downtime.
Fusion and plasma physics is where most of our recent public profile sits, and rightly so — it’s the fastest-growing part of the market, with 80-plus fusion companies now actively buying hardware. We’ve shipped to multiple companies across different confinement approaches, and have active pipeline conversations with many more.
The New Product Expansion
What’s changed in the last three years is not just the return to a diversified model — it’s that we’ve arrived back in those markets with a significantly expanded product portfolio. Products that simply didn’t exist before we started building them for fusion customers.
The WE-PS high-voltage supply family now spans 100 kV to 400 kV, with the 100 kV unit having passed full Factory Acceptance Testing. This is directly applicable to neutral beam injection systems, particle accelerator pulsed power, and directed energy applications — not just fusion.
The WE-HTS-5T superconducting solenoid operates at 20 K using second-generation YBCO tape — the same HTS technology that the new generation of compact fusion developers is counting on for high-field magnets. But a 5 T solenoid with a clear bore is also relevant to MRI research, quantum computing infrastructure, and materials characterization. HTS magnets were an exotic capability five years ago. We now build them in-house in Santa Fe.
The WE-CB-1MJ capacitor bank, which has passed FAT, covers the energy-storage needs of applications from fusion diagnostics to electromagnetic metal forming. The WE-OR-35 series handles kV-class pulsed power from 1 kA to 6 kA. The WE-PSU supercapacitor supply family scales from 8 kA at 0.5 MW up to 250 kA at 500 MW for the largest tokamak applications.
And then there’s a product line that exemplifies this cross-pollination particularly well.
When Fusion Know-How Meets the Quantum Lab
The WE-MFC-3-Axis Magnetic Field Cancellation System is a good example of how fusion-derived expertise finds unexpected applications.
The physics of precise magnetic field control — creating a known, stable field environment and holding it against external disturbances — is something we’ve been doing for plasma confinement work for years. Helmholtz coil design, closed-loop control with fluxgate magnetometers, understanding how thermal gradients affect field stability: these are problems fusion engineers live with.
It turns out that quantum sensing researchers, magnetometer calibration facilities, and aerospace component test programs need exactly the same things. The WE-MFC-8FT creates an 8-foot cubic working volume with residual fields below 100 nT — that’s roughly 500 times below the Earth’s ambient field — using a triaxial Helmholtz configuration with closed-loop nulling. The same engineering discipline that keeps plasma-facing coils stable keeps a quantum sensor’s test environment clean.
The product line runs from compact 2-foot systems for bench use up to 12-foot industrial installations with 250 A per axis and water-cooled coils for continuous high-power operation. Applications span ultra-low-field NMR and MRI research, atomic magnetometry, SQUID testing, satellite and spacecraft magnetic cleanliness verification, and nitrogen-vacancy center experiments. None of these customers need to confine a plasma. All of them need precisely controlled magnetic fields, which is something we know how to build.
Why Diversification Makes You Better, Not Just Safer
There’s a business case for diversification that’s obvious: revenue from defense and industrial customers funds operations while you wait for fusion contracts to scale. That’s true, and we won’t pretend it isn’t a factor.
But the engineering case is more interesting. When you build a power supply for a directed energy application, you learn things about transient response and electromagnetic compatibility that make your fusion PSUs better. When you build a field cancellation system for a quantum lab, you develop closed-loop control firmware that informs how you approach stability requirements on a tokamak coil supply. When you build capacitor banks for industrial electromagnetic forming — applications that demand millions of reliable cycles — you build in robustness that fusion test systems, with their much lower cycle counts, wouldn’t have demanded.
Cross-pollination isn’t just a story we tell. It’s what actually happens in a small, experienced engineering team that has to solve different problems with overlapping tools.
What Comes Next?
We’re not hedging our bets on fusion — we think it’s coming, and we want to be the indispensable supplier when it does. Hardware we’ve already delivered to fusion customers is the most effective sales tool we have for the next wave of fusion procurement. The qualification work is done. The factory acceptance data exists.
But we’re also genuinely excited about what’s happening in quantum sensing, in directed energy, in the accelerator facilities that underpin so much fundamental science, and in industrial applications of high-field electromagnets that most people have never thought about. These are markets with real procurement budgets, recurring purchase cycles, and customers who value engineering quality and delivery reliability above everything else.
If you have a magnet or power supply need — not necessarily to confine a plasma — we’d like to hear from you. Our team is ready to discuss specifications, timeline, and fit. Twenty years of hard problems means we’ve probably seen something like yours before.
By Dr. Simon Woodruff, CEO — Woodruff Engineering Inc.
Woodruff Engineering Inc. is based in Santa Fe, NM with a UK subsidiary opened in 2022. To discuss your requirements, contact our sales team at sales@woodruffeng.com or reach out directly to Shaun Connolly or Adam Koehler on LinkedIn.