The Venetian blind design is a type of electrostatic direct collector. The Venetian Blind design name comes from the visual similarity of the ribbons to venetian window blinds. Designs in the early 1970s by William Barr and Ralph Moir used repeating metal ribbons at a specified angle as the ion collector plates.  These metal ribbon-like surfaces are more transparent to ions going forward than to ions going backward. Ions pass through surfaces of successively increasing potential until they turn and start back, along a parabolic trajectory. They then see opaque surfaces and are caught. Thus ions are sorted by energy with high-energy ions being caught on high-potential electrodes.
William Barr and Ralph Moir then ran a group which did a series of direct energy conversion experiments through the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first experiments used beams of positives and negatives as fuel, and demonstrated energy capture at a peak efficiency of 65 percent and a minimum efficiency of 50 percent. The following experiments involved a true plasma direct converter that was tested on the Tandem Mirror Experiment (TMX), an operating magnetic mirror fusion reactor. In the experiment, the plasma moved along diverging field lines, spreading it out and converting it into a forward moving beam with a Debye length of a few centimeters. Suppressor grids then reflect the electrons, and collector anodes recovered the ion energy by
slowing them down and collecting them at high-potential plates.  This machine demonstrated an energy capture efficiency of 48 percent. However, Marshall Rosenbluth argued that keeping the plasma's neutral charge over the very short Debye length distance would be very challenging in practice, though he said that this problem would not occur in every version of this technology.
The Venetian Blind converter can operate with 100 to 150 keV D-T plasma, with an efficiency of about 60% under conditions compatible with economics, and an upper technical conversion efficiency up to 70% ignoring economic limitations.