"Electron Return Time" ?

[Paul_Schatzkin]

Can anybody tell me what "Electron Return Time" really means?

When I was researching my Farnsworth bio, Steve Blaising told a story about a meeting on Pontiac Street where Farnsworth started talking about "electron return time" and a visitor asked "where did you get THAT" expression (implying that Farnsworth was off on one of his flights of theoretical fancy...).

That question has never really been answered and, curiously, it's just come up in my Townsend Brown research. So, can anybody tell me what the expression means, and/or where the expression comes from?

Thanks,

--PS

[Richard Hull]

It means what ever the user or "coiner" wants it to mean and nothing more.

Science has to coin terms as new technologies and concepts arise. Unfortunately, new energy freaks, pseudo-scientific types, absolutely wrap themselves in self-generated jargon as it grabs the hapless onlooker and locks in the faithful with "their own language".

Any new technology or idea may have to generate terms like "electron return time" Such terms must, however, be immediately preceeded or followed by a full and concise discussion of the process it describes, preferably, in a scientific paper.

Farnsworth may or may not have explained to those assembled the meaning as related to his work. I am certainly not privvy to any such term in electronics or general physics usage. This is probably why he was called to task by those assembled.

Scientists want desparately to understand discussions in and among their peers and will readily call to task any unfamiliar usages that they feel might be internally generated by other experimenters. It is simply part of the process of understanding. Lots of terms are immediately grasped by those in the field such as "field emission", "delayed neutrons", "Isomeric transition", etc. Each of these terms could easily be explained to any first year college kid taking physics, but they would require anywhere from 2 to 20 paragraphs of text to fully treat and make clear to the adroit, but uninformed person. Once understood and fully accepted, as the above terms are, discussion of far more complicated issues can proceed using this jargon without explanation.

"Electron return time" is unfamiliar, unaccepted jargon to my knowledge, but I could easily see it applying to some process between two points in vacuuo where electrons are part of the operational modus and their presence is time ordered and of critical importance. Beyond this, it is a crap shoot. We need Farnsworth to explain.

Richard Hull

[DaveC]

I was wondering if it might apply to some aspect of the recirculation concept. Since both electrons and ions could loop around in the potential fields inside the fusor, it might be just a Farnsworth term for the period of the electron "orbit", using that term somewhat loosely.

Dave Cooper

[Steven Sesselmann]

If you guys don't mind me giving an uninformed opinion, I think the electon
orbit idea has merit. The ions in a working fusor chamber all move in
orbits, with the occasional interruption by a rare collision. If you call the
period of the orbit "the Ion Return Time" then the IRT would be proportional
to the voltage. ie. higher voltage shorter IRT resulting in a denser plasma
and a higher output.

So the objective is to get the shortest possible IRT without the ions
colliding with the chamber walls, causing earth leakage etc.

Steven

[001userid]

For me, it would be the time the ion has available to circulate before an electron returns into its orbit around the ion. I don't see any obvious location in the fusor that an electron could/would orbit.
Joe Sal

[DaveC]

With the spherical wire cage inner electrode, ions can circulate numerous times, if the initial trajectory takes the ion just past one of the inner grid conductors. Other launch trajectories will result in the ion impacting the inner grid.

As modeled with Simion 7, the paths typically describe open spirals and can loop several hundred times, before the ion collides with an electrode. The program cannot model gas collisions, however, so these trajectories represent only what could occur in a high vacuum.

A 20 keV deuteron will have a velocity of some 1.38 x 10^6 m/sec, making the loop times in an 8"diameter fusor on the order of 350 ns.

Electrons would be faster by about 60x.

Dave Cooper

[Chris Trent]

Could it be that this refers to the multipacitor effect? As I understand it, Farnsworth was using this effect in his original fusor before Hirsch helped simplify things. When using the multipacitor effect, transit times between the electrodes become critical. Could this have been what he meant by electron return time.

Perhaps he was still thinking of fusion in these terms.

[Retric]

"A 20 keV deuteron will have a velocity of some 1.38 x 10^6 m/sec,
making the loop times in an 8"diameter fusor on the order of 350 ns.

Electrons would be faster by about 60x."

True, but Electrons have an opisite charge so they would travel
directly to the fusor's outer all and colide at a good fraction of C.

There is no way for them to orbit.

[Richard Hull]

JKirby is correct.....no orbiting electrons.

Back to the Perfesser's original question............You all have proved, with the ensuing guesswork, that without the coiner of the phrase......."electron return time"..... is, and probably will forever, remain a mystery, though, we could certainly jabber about it, back and forth, until the proverbial cows come home.

Richard Hull

[DaveC]

I agree - In the operating fusor, with a negative inner electrode, they will head to the shell, in more or less radial paths, once they are away from the electrode surface.

However, you can certainly set a "fusor-like" geometry, and launch electrons from a cathode out near the shell, toward the central electrode (which would have to be positive in this case), and the electrons will also circulate, at some 60X velocity, and not in the same trajectories, since the e/m ratio is different.

Sorry for the confusion, I actually did not mean that both ion flavors circulated at the same time. We have already discussed this part at length in earlier threads.

Dave Cooper

[Steven Sesselmann]

Every now and then, there is mention of Farnsworth's Multipactor, and I
have never seen a drawing of it. How does the Multipactor differ from the
Farnsworth/Hirsch fusor?

Steven

[Richard Hull]

Obviously, Farnsworth's original brain storm that never did anything, DID have orbiting electrons as it had the species reversed as was the polarity within the device. This device was dead by 1962. It was an extension of his multipactor concept. It just failed to fuse at a measurable level.

Richard Hull

[DaveC]

It seems to me that for several "revolutions" ions will (could?) circulate in some sort of looping path. Simulations show that, at least. But if all were doing more or less similar things, then the probability of further collisions is not particularly higher, unless some sort of decoupling or de-phasing is established.

Obviously if one cloud of ions circulated slightly faster than another cloud (and one must use the term cloud rather loosely, here), then where the paths intersected on subsequent orbits, the intersection zone would move along in relative position through both ion clouds on each successive orbit. This might increase the probability of collision.

Without doing a few "many-ion" simulations which would allow the recording of hits and near misses, by logging nearest approach data, it is not at all clear that the recirculation gains much except on paper. The software I have access to, might work with an overall flying program, but at this point I am not sure.

Also that Farnsworth and others could not seem to make recirculation work may tell most of the tale. I am musing about whether there might be a way to make recirculation work, and if it did, how much of an efficiency gain could one expect, if any..

Dave Cooper

[Dustinit]

I know this is an old thread
but on reading through some of his patents I found
a reference that he was possibly referring to.


Patent 3,258,402

Dustin.

[Paul_Schatzkin]

That's a nice find. Thanks for digging it up.

I trust you know by now that the TTBrown excursion has gone off the rails.

Hard to know what to believe when you're getting your best info from spooks, and then you find out they've been lying to you.

And so it goes.

--PS