Fusion Progress in 04

[3l]

Hi Folks:

Under construction:
This is a condensation of many years of posts by many folks.

The things we do well:

Heat:

The dirrect drive electrostatic system works really good at giving the deuterium ions heat/kinetic energy.... 11,800K degrees per volt applied way better than ohmic heating in plasma or cyclotronic heating.

Confinement & Compression:

The inertial confinement needs work but the spherical system
does not have major leaks due to some incrutible magnetic effect. Our temperatures have greatly exceeded the magnetic fusion gizmos of Princeton ...their confinement is measured in microseconds...ours has yet to be determined but I'll wager it could run an entire year. Any takers?.

Neutron production:

Through the efforts of Jon Rosenstiel the power input has been definatively documented at a full kilowatt of input power.
Happily the neutron production goes up with the rise of input power. Contrast this to the doomed Tokamak project where an entire city's worth of power was input to get 10 Megawatts for a whole microsecond. Raising the heat was nay on impossible with all the energy leaks popping up everywhere. Impossible to raise the fusion rate no matter how hard they tried.... how did we do it in the fusor?
Turn up the voltage!
It is simply the acceleration method vs the bun in the oven radiative heating approach..... the benifits allow us to move on to other issues instead of just mucking around day in and day out
trying to heat the reaction mass.

I sincerely have come to doubt all radiative heating methods vs Inertial Electrostatic Confinement. The probability of loss is just too great no matter the method...the coupling of electrostaic is almost 100% vs 10-20% tops for radiative transfer heating methods.
Why so low?
Well simply stated your high energy photon (?) must be dirrected in a dirrection toward your fuel..then must couple with the surface of the fuel in a pellet and blow away fuel mass at low temperatures to get compression. Then heat the compacted mass by radiation transfer of energy. In ALL steps you have wasted energy,fuel,scattered photons that are not absorbed by your fuel. This shoots in the foot all fusion by laser ,xrays, or neutrons or hydrogen bomb setups.

Before we get too braggy...things we suck at:

Power Production:

The holy grail of this group for the most part...if unspoken.
Things that scew up power production.

Electron losses:

The electron losses are monumental in continous fusors.
90 % of losses are this type....10 % are ionization problems.
where do you think our xrays come from?
Free electrons are vital to keeping the central grid negatively charged but in our setup those free electrons must be constantly regenerated to replace thoses sucked back to the case by the electrical potential between the inner grid and the case. Aw don't look like that. There is a method to deal with the problem....multicusp confinment at the case.
Has anyone got one of these critters hidden away?
What is this ?
It simply (?) means that on the case are stuck arrays of magnets that have alternating north and south poles that cause the electron to orbit above the case. Instead of breastreuming and make a low efficientcy xray that electron makes more deteterium atoms into ions. Solving two major problems at once.
Any Takers? Some thing for the young guys maybe?

[Richard Hull]

There is always the "one watt challenge"...............

Hal Puthoff, ex. Los Alamos physicist, entered the new energy arena upon retirement. He made this challenge at the new energy conference in Denver in 1994. He was frustrated by all of the propeller headed claims of over unity, but no real useful output shown from the effort.

Simply stated........ Power your device with its own output energy and give me just one more watt extra in the form of electricity and you are a winner! (It is fine to use thousands of seed watts to start the system, but it must ultimately be disconnected from all outside energy sources and run off its own output, plus give one more watt). One watt is the power needed to light one single small flashlight bulb.

Right now, in the very best fusor with a full KW of input power from OUTSIDE....not powering itself, the total output energy due to fusion alone if fully converted with 100% efficiency would still need to be boosted ten thousand times to light the little lamp and still suck a kilowatt outta' th' wall.

Fusion is poorly done by man and its use as a future power source looks especially grim with all the new...old... projects being born anew while Rome burns.

For me, we never left the starting gate. We can write books on failures and how best to proceed to NOT do fusion. Fifty years of paying billions for the privilege of standing at the starting gate is no bargain. The fusor is just the cheapest way to do fusion at a worthless level approaching that of more expensive systems.

Oh! Hal's "one watt challenge"??? Still no self-powered takers on his gauntlet thrown down in 94. Zero success in nine years across the board. What he is asking for is a self powered 1 watt generator. Fission is busy doing it now and on the grid. Take away all fission and not even the hydrogen bomb can work.

Hal is currently the head scientist at Earth Tech. There, he, Scott Little and others are examining new energy devices and claims of over unity.

http://www.earthtech.org


Richard Hull

[3l]

Hi Richard:

Wow...years gathering this stuff.
It has taken me 5 years to get the equipment to behave.
I have purposely chosen a simple device.
I did not know who issued the one watt challege.
Thank you for enlightening the forum.
I have the rig now.
I'm still screwing around with the shielding !@#$%.
I went back to the Farnsworth archives to look at the "pit".
I love their setup but the cost is pretty substancial with the lift approach.
Neutron measurements have held me back in years past.
I have finally gotten 1GW into the fusor for a nanosecond with air.
1 GW with deuterium is next.
It maybe tough but here goes.
I will pretty much know if I get 1 watt.
My aim is simply to get one watt of fusion period.
No matter of the seed watts needed to make it go.
Making electricity with fusion is as far away as the moon right now....
I figured a good intermediate first step is to make one watt of fusion then reduce the input power to what was needed by power averaging
No one on planet Mud has done it yet..
I'm sticking with silver activation for now until I can save up for a nim pre amp.
IF and that's a mighty big if,I get even within 10% of my yield goal
I will be happy.

Happy Fusoring!
Larry Leins
Fusor Tech

[jst]

Walk before you run.

You need to reverse the "where we suck" part. First you need to properly contain the reactions... then we'll worry about power production.

I'd say containing the microstar is a function of the "equivalence principle" in that the focused collision at the mircostar is very similar to a gravitational field containing a real star. Right now we're running what is at best a "sub"brown dwarf. We need to up the energy of the containment field. Some are doing it by upping the voltage from the minimum 20Kev to 100Kev. But the minimum energy from a fusion reaction is 4MEV and may be as high as 22MEV ( depending on whats in there ). You need to be able to contain the fusion products ( to eliminate humungous losses ), and that requires a containment field of at least 22MEV!
Thats HOT. And it requires beam "guns" as opposed to the simple compactron structure we currently use. We have options here, but they require some work on our part.

Generating energy from a fully contained ( 22MEV field ) microstar may already be within our grasp. Adam's question about toroids brought up the possibility of putting 2 spheres at the ends of a straight drift tube. Allowing reaction products from the microstars to oscillate back and forth inside the drift tube would provide a magnetic coupling medium for energy extraction that would likely be near 100% efficient. The drift tube would also be one of the "ion guns" that alternately contains and releases fusion products from the opposing microstars... elegant?...

[3l]

Hi Joe:

I have not given up on linacs and guns.
The problem I realised was that you still need to create very high voltages and amperages to run a fusion style gun system.
So I am pushing in the supply generation end....pulse power.
All the stuff I have planned greatly exceeds the power conmpany's delivery abilities besides the issue of paying for it.
(I sometimes wonder what the electrical bills for the Pontiac Lab were)
One thing I have realised early was that knowledge and equipment from on type of equipment could be used in totally different circumstances. No Effort is ever wasted.
I want a watt so I can get my instruments up to snuff and allow me to accurately measure high power events with realism.
The shield also needs this high level for a "low" power test before a linac collider goes in. Any screw ups will be found
without tears so to speak.

Happy Fusoring!
Larry Leins
Fusor Tech

[Adam Szendrey]

Hi Larry!

So in essence a fusor with such a magnetic array would act somewhat like a magnetron, making the electrons orbit above the shell? I hope i get that idea right.

Adam

[3l]

Hi Adam:

That is exactly right.
The orbiting electrons ionize neutral deuterium atom...
reducing loss to the shell and the recirculation losses of neutral atoms.

Happy Fusoring!
Larry Leins
Fusor Tech

[Adam Szendrey]

Hi again!

Sounds worthy to try. Such a setup would probably consist of cylindrical grids and a coil wound around the shell to create the required B field along the axis of the grids right? The shell ofcourse must not be made of anything ferromagnetic such as steel. Or the coil can be placed inside, but that sounds a bit complicated. The shell could be made of Al. Instead of a coil , large ring magnets or several small blocks in a ring can be used, but in that case the field is static and cannot be adjusted.

Adam

[grrr6]

That is not a multicusp. What Larry is talking about is this: you take cheapo cylindrical permanent magnets maybe 1 inch cubed (estimate). You buy a hundred of them, and then you take your non magnetic shell, and glue (or whatever)them on. Every inch is covered in magnets, all times, the N of one is next to the S of another. Its basically the same thing as a multicusp ion source, except with the fusor shell and not the sources shell. Everything is on the outside, so you dont need to worry about the magnets going above curie temp if you are doing short runs or have lots of cooling. I dont know how well this would work with high energy electrons, but should work well with mid enegery range electrons.

[DaveC]

I think magnetic confinement ideas, while appealingly
simple, do not address the issue before us for fusion.

To fuse, you need to have atoms collide, not just contain them. That is, they must pass within a fraction of their nominal nucleus "diameter", which requires a few 10's of keV kinetic energy. A simple concept, but remarkably challenging when we take into account, HOW we will actually go about making the collision.

It is useful to think about how to get just two deuterons to collide. Since they are of similar charge, they will be repelled. Thus we must propel them towards each other. For them to collide, they must pass within a fraction of their nuclear diameter. This requires meeting two conditions simultaneously: (1) Their paths must pass through space within a fraction of one atomic nucleus diameter (perhaps 0.1 pico meter
(10^-13m) , and (2), they must both arrive at precisely the same point in space at precisely the same time, in order pass within less than one nucleus diameter and thus collide, At 0.1 picometer distance, the Coulomb potential equation, indicates two deuterons - one electronic charge (1.6 x 10^-19 Coul.) each - would have a potential energy of about 16 keV. At this energy, they will be travelling at about 0.9 x10^6 meters/sec. Thus in order for these two ions to "collide" they must arrive at the collision point within about 10^-18 sec of each other!! This is timing within one billionth of a nanosecond!

This is so severe, it is no wonder the number of ions must be enormous in order to get a few parts per million of them to collide.

Since the fusor IS spherical, and the inner grids are more or less spherical, the deuterons arrive along radial paths and thus must pass through the "star" region for fusion to occur.

The ionizing process being completely random, the timing and position of all ions inward-bound is also random, as is the actual path. If you think of ions approaching the center of the poisseur volume, it will be clear that they can easily pass right on by each other, not coming within a country mile of the fusing distance, simply because they are all at different points on the path.

With pulsing, the timing problem remains. Although the instanteous currents may be orders of magnitude higher, the generation of ions is still uncertain within tenths of nsec or longer.

Where I get to, with this is that the collision paths need to be very close to anti-parallel. In other words the lensing needs to be quite long focal length, so that the ions are travelling the longest possible time over nearly identical paths but in opposite directions.

It is like a collision between two trains on the same track travelling in opposite directions. It is inevitable. But a collision between the train and a truck at a crossing is not They have to all be there as exactly the right time.

Just some more thoughts on the nature of the beast.

Dave Cooper

[Adam Szendrey]

I don't think Larry has described an idea to confine fusion. It is rather a way to reduce losses in the system, making it more energy efficient.
I now see how this idea should work, and it seems quite simple to try. For high field densities NIB magnets can be used, but probably simple cheramic magnets will do fine (and they cost a lot less too). I'm not sure about keeping the magnets below the Curie point. The fusor's shell usually gets quite hot after even short runs judjing from the posts here (please corretc me if i'm wrong). But even if short runs are okay, longer periods will most likely heat things up.So the magnets can be cooled using a copper tube spiral around the fusor and circulating the water through a heat exchanger, or something similar. OR , if the idea works fine and it does dramatically reduce the number of electrons hitting the shell, then the whole system will produce a lot less heat, though high energy ions most likely will not be deflected by the field, due to their large mass.

Adam

[3l]

Hi Guys:

I did some on the envelope calculations while waiting at DMV.
The tiny 15 cent neodynium iron magnets at forcefield.com will divert up to 40kv electrons. Adam is right it is a scheme to reduce losses at the shell not to contain ions at the grid.
The low speed (non fusion) positive ions will never hit the positively charged shell but they will be impeded by neutral atoms at the periphery of the shell.
Hence a swarm of high speed electrons will ionize any neutrals in its path.

Happy fusoring!
Larry Leins
Fusor Tech

[Adam Szendrey]

It seems large NIB magnets here cost much less, then what prices i see on the net.For smaller pieces the price difference is not that significant. The smallest i can buy here has a 1/8" (3 mm) dia. and it's 1/8" thick too (twice the size of the 15 cent magnet) and i can buy it for about 24 cents. Anyway i was planning to make a visit to the company that sells these babies.
I did a little approximative calculation on the required number of magnet discs in case of a 5" spherical chamber (a perfect sphere). From these small 1/8" magnets one would require about 4900 (!!) to completely cover the surface. Sounds a little too much, and VERY expensive even here. Using larger discs this problem can be easily overcome, but then another problem is fixing these extremely strong NIB magnets in place. I have a little experience with them, and i can tell you the most complicated thing is the handling of these magnets.
Larry, can i ask you how to calculate the deflection capability of a magnet? Thanks!

Adam

[3l]

Hi Adam:

The curvature of reflectance is calculated by the cyclotron radius.. You have to determine a set place where the magnets field is at it's maximum then see if the radius of the electron will miss the magnet face.
The distance will have to be measured.

Happy fusoring!
Larry Leins
Fusor Tech