I'm just starting into learning about fusors but I have an amazingly stupid question.
My basic understanding is that fusors work by creating a deep enough potential well to keep ions ocsilating back and forth through a central area. Add fuel to the center, and if you've gotten your magnitudes correct you'll achieve fusion.
Unforunately the apparatus to create the potential well also blocks the paths of the ions, robbing energy from the system.
So my probably amazingly ignorant question is.. why not multiple potential wells? Orientate them around a central point, wells overlapping so the center point has a higher potential than any of the given generators. Ions might initially go to one of the genetrating wells , but their orbits should be drawn towards the stronger, artifical one fairly rapidly. So long as they are caught by the 'artificail' well at a faster rate than lost to impacts from the generator apperatus,you should have a system with a significantly reduced loss due to non-productive impacts.
Not claiming I'd expect a perfectly efficent system. I'd suspect as you reached a certain density of ions an exponential increase in cost to introduce more.
Am I making any sort of sense, or merely sound like a bored unix programmer who has had MS software forced upon him for too long? I don't expect my idea to be correct, just hoping it'll expose enough defects in my knowledge that I might learn something. |
2003-09-14 19:53 why just one potential well? (mtrusty) [Latest: 2003-09-19 17:07]