Electromagnet Grid

This forum is for other possible methods for fusion such as Sonolumenescense, Cold Fusion, CANR/LENR or accelerator fusion. It should contain all theory, discussions and even construction and URLs related to "other than fusor, fusion".
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Joel Green
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Electromagnet Grid

Post by Joel Green »

My theory is about electromagnetism with nuclear fusion. I haven't heard about this use with reactors. Though its usd in many applications. Its fact that electromagnets can contain plasma to where it does not touch any walls such as a chamber. Plasma and electromagnetism go hand in hand. So propose rings of positive charged electromagnets with one horizontaly, verticaly, and both diagonly. It would contain both heat, plasma, and the reaction contained. Hopefully this will cause ignition.
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Richard Hull
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by Richard Hull »

Magnetic confinement, in its many forms, has been the darling little baby of fusion reactor construction since Lyman Spitzer's first Stellarator back in the early 50's and still is, to this day! A continuous succession of epic fails with this process over the last 60 some odd years and billions of the money spent on it. They just won't throw this baby out with the wash water. Sorry 'bout that great idea you had. It is 60+ years old.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
Joel Green
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by Joel Green »

Thanks. Didn't know it was already tried. I was thinking of projects like VSMIR and the hadron collider usage of superconducting electromagnets. Palladium Hydride is a perfect example of a super conductor. Though its not an electromagnet.
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Chris Bradley
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by Chris Bradley »

Joel Green wrote:My theory is about electromagnetism with nuclear fusion. I haven't heard about this use with reactors.
The most cursory of all possible searches on the internet would have revealed the facts. You simply haven't even typed 'fusion' and 'electromagnetism' into the same search bar.

We used to have folks who would fear to post for years before venturing to comment here, concerned they would say something misinformed. We currently seem to be having a succession of brain-blurts dumping whatever they have thought up in their own solitary imaginations, straight after getting off the TV watching star trek, or whatever has lead to said brain-blurts.

Can't anyone bother to look anything up any more?

If you have sat in front of your computer and said "Computer! Tell me if anyone has tried fusion with electromagnetic fields" and you got no reply from your computer, that is NOT because it hasn't been tried, it is because you don't know how a computer works.
prestonbarrows
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by prestonbarrows »

Richard Hull wrote:...A continuous succession of epic fails with this process over the last 60 some odd years...
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Richard Hull
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by Richard Hull »

The epic fails relate to attempts to actually go over unity for 24 hours a day 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Any fusion reaction system that costs over 20 million dollars to complete and fails to do this is an epic fail regardless of magestic improvements in output or other related numbers.

Regardless of the system, a mere statement where more energy is put into a more gigantic and costly system where more energy comes out of that more gigantic and more costly system for only moments of operation means little to power companies or energy hungry industries and consumers. Science works and lauds the numbers while the world works off raw, supplied energy; energy that is there always in an uninterupted stream, at a price that is not increasing beyond all reason.

No fusion system producing over unity output that runs continuously over months or years has ever been produced. Nor has this goal been even approached to a point in either science or engineering where hope exists to see an end point for the possibility of same.

The old fusion saw of "real soon now" has been dropped and replaced by "Continue giving us money and we will continue to do more fusion and maybe one day in the future, we won't say when, we'll lick this thing.....Trust us."

Fusion is the energy of the future and it always will be.

Ricahrd Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
John Futter
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by John Futter »

Preston
Interesting graph
but
It should have been power in vs power out
yes there have been some major advances for pulsed operation higher output etc and who defined the "Y" axis to those hubbly units
but Fusion is ready when it sits at 100 -1000 : 1 power out vs power in in continuous mode 24/7/365
and nobody is even 0.01% of this goal yet.
every advance is painfully slow but the result trickle is fast to keep the funding in place for many years to come.
As Richard has said many times
Bring on the lucky donkey
as it will need a herd of them to make fusion a reality in any of the lifetimes of the members here
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Chris Bradley
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by Chris Bradley »

The most successful fusion to date is at JET where they have tritium handling. [Using DD is assumed to be 1/200th of the performance of DT. It is the fudge factor JT-60 used to come up with its 'break-even' figure.] The best DT run they have is 18MJ fusion out to 22MJ of energy in. The UK Gov has written this up in its argument for more funding has having exceeded the energy in.

Maths clearly isn't a strong point of the UK Gov.

But is that the energy in? That's the energy into the plasma, once it has formed. Before that, they had to energise the chamber with 1 GJ of magnetic energy.

Oh, and also about 4MJ out was from the direct fusion of neutral beams injected into the plasma, beam-on-target. They have counted that energy as 'fusion energy out', or should that be 'energy in' if they were properly accounting for 'thermonuclear' fusion which they say is tokmamak's principle of operation. I'd say that changes the figures to 1026MJ in for 14MJ out.

As Hirsch well pointed out in his time in office, there is way too much emphasis on 'interesting plasma physics' than 'getting fusion'. The graph above shows 'interesting plasma physics'.
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Richard Hull
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by Richard Hull »

Here, here, Well spoken Chris!

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Dennis P Brown
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by Dennis P Brown »

One project (built but far from operational) is the German Stellarator the Wendelstein 7-X (see the pdf http://www.nifs.ac.jp/itc/itc18/upload/ ... 0_Wolf.pdf.) This system makes the most simple plasma possible for a closed loop system and as I understand, is highly tolerate of minor instabilities by way of an extremely complex, costly machine (relative to magnetic field designs, it is a reverse approach compared to the tokamak for better or possibly worse.) This system has a goal of 10-30 Mega-watts for 30 minutes of continuous operation (Not a crazy pulse system like tokamaks - this system is trying for real burn conditions in a fashion similar too a real reactor environment.) The energy input (to start) will be far greater than any possible output and still not insignificant during the burn cycle (this isn't even an attempt at power production.) But if this puppy works (looks likely - however, getting the time and energy levels is a completely different story) it will far, far out perform any existing or projected system (ITER I'm looking at you and no one in their right mind looks at NIF except to laugh at Livermore.) One last word - they went far past their start date (no surprise for sch a complex machine) but strangely, came well under budget - which means, boy did they con the funding agency for their initial money!!!!)
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Richard Hull
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by Richard Hull »

Interesting design, but just chocked full o' design phases and goals, any one of which might fall on its face, in spite of fine modeling and effort on behalf of a dedicated group. We will keep our eye on this one if we should live so long.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
prestonbarrows
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by prestonbarrows »

ITER, as a thermalized device, will never be an apples to apples comparison to a polywell (pseudo-beam-type) device, whether it ultimately produces net energy or not.

~95% of the standard theoretical framework generally applied to tokamaks typically assumes a thermalized isotrotropic motion and cylindrical or helical symmetry which can not be directly applied to a polywell.

Truth is that there is some theoretical promise that a polywell device could possibly outperform a traditional fusor or tokamak but no one has definitively dis/proven this in any experiment to date that I am aware of.
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Chris Bradley
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by Chris Bradley »

prestonbarrows wrote:Truth is that there is some theoretical promise that a polywell device could possibly outperform a traditional fusor or tokamak but no one has definitively dis/proven this in any experiment to date that I am aware of.
That's a bit of a flimsy straw man. There are any number of crack-pot ideas that have not yet been 'disproved', but that hardly amounts to a 'truth' of a possibility.

This, IMHO, is a 'failure' of current scientific education that people actually look at science in this way: You can create a theory to explain an extant observation, or you can use extant theories to predict a new, testable hypothesis. It is not 'scientific' to imagine a possible outcome and then adapt theories to explain why it might be possible. There can be no logical suggestion that an unproven hypothesis derived solely for the purpose of trying to explain a phenomena not yet observed needs to be 'disproved' in any way. An unproven hypothesis remains an unproven hypothesis and no investment of any effort whatsoever is required by anyone who chooses to dismiss it as an irrelevance. It is for the proponent to prove - a point often misunderstood by newbs here with 'new theories' that the rest of us are [as we're told] too 'close-minded' to understand.

I also disagree with the supposition. In the first approximation, the idea of rounding up electrons that can then electrostatically capture heavier ions seems to have been show to be a flawed theory by the failure of the ETW device to act as predicted. There is no question that you can multipact electrons in to a space, but they don't appear to act as an 'electrode' to heavy ion acceleration.

You might also note that Bussard's original complaint against tokamak was that it had absorbed $millions and produced no fusion after decades. That is now true for his creation also, and his complaint now applies to his own invention too.

Being able to bunch up a gang'o'electrons is no demonstration of fusion. It is back to the Hirsch observation; very interesting physics, maybe, but where's the fusion?
prestonbarrows
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by prestonbarrows »

Chris Bradley wrote:very interesting physics, maybe, but where's the fusion?
That is all I was trying to say. It is an interesting idea that has not been looked into very much either in theory or experiment.

Recently, there have been a few solid papers from the University of Sydney with very low energy devices that show potential well formation and promising scaling. However, this was all electron-only I believe and far from anything capable of fusion. There has also been some recent simulation work published here at the University of Wisconsin. But, of course, extrapolating from small devices and simulation typically does not work well in fusion experiments.

Basically all of Bussard's public experimental results are bordering on unscientific garbage. But, to my knowledge, they are the only (non peer-reviewed) "published" examples of full devices actually being run with D.
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Chris Bradley
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by Chris Bradley »

prestonbarrows wrote: It is an interesting idea that has not been looked into very much either in theory or experiment.
It's had at least 30 years and at least $30 million. How much time and money do you need to put into a project before you can conclude it is not viable?
prestonbarrows
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Re: Electromagnet Grid

Post by prestonbarrows »

I believe the private companies started by Bussard have gotten repeated government funding up to the present day. But as far as I know, none of the recent results have been made public and are in the realm of classified/NDA information. Is this what you are referring to?

Are any of these recent results available publicly? What makes you claim they are 'not viable'? Presumably, their repeated renewal of funding shows at least someone thinks it is a promising idea (or they have an outstanding team of lobbyists).

Are there any examples of peer reviewed devices running with deuterium?

My quick search through the literature turns up basically nothing except the University of Sydney group over the past few years with a small, low power, electron only, device.

Don't take this as me being antagonistic or trying to champion one approach over another. I am just genuinely curious about the idea.
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