Fusor analogy to quadrupole mass spectrometer

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Doug Coulter
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Re: Fusor analogy to quadrupole mass spectrometer

Post by Doug Coulter »

As to "can't work in a dense fluid with collisions and varying e/m ratios, I give you CERN's project for *high schoolers*. Obviously it can work with oddball e/m ratios and in dense fluid media - this is dust in STP air. We just do in and out instead of up and down as shown here. Think of inside their ring as inside a fusor grid, where the density is highest, and know that it's not one bunch of particles - while one set is going up, the other is going down and they can collide in the middle...
We just do a better job of focus in the middle, have more interesting particles, and so on.

https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-s ... antimatter
CERN's easy trap
CERN's easy trap
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Dan Knapp
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Re: Fusor analogy to quadrupole mass spectrometer

Post by Dan Knapp »

Doug
Have you looked at the Kingdon trap, or the variation with AC called the "dynamic Kingdon trap"? [Dynamic Kingdon trap,
R. Blümel Phys. Rev. A 51, R30(R) (1995)]. This might be easier to relate geometrically to a fusor. It is essentially ions circulating about a central electrode within a confining shell.
ian_krase
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Re: Fusor analogy to quadrupole mass spectrometer

Post by ian_krase »

Doug Coulter,

It's very good to hear from you on Fusor.net!

This is interesting to hear about because I have been working on building my own quadrupole mass spectrometer. Unfortunately I dread that I am not equal to the challenge of putting together an appropriate power supply -- and control system thereof. My matching network... works.... when driven with a function generator but that is far from a working system -- especially given the need to precisely control voltages.

of course now this project (and most of my other vacuum and plasma related experiments) sadly must now go on hold and into boxes, because I am busy gearing up to move and follow the Coulter lifestyle.
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Doug Coulter
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Re: Fusor analogy to quadrupole mass spectrometer

Post by Doug Coulter »

I didn't know my lifestyle had gone "official" ;~} I will say this - it's not a game for old guys, I'm really glad I did most all of the hard stuff before I got old...
Now I even have a raspberry pi camera looking at the innards of my rain barrel so I can decide to keep or dump the water without going out there (it's usually nasty weather when you want to know) - and a wifi ESP8266 in the basement controlling the plumbing for both grey and drinking water, as well as letting in rain barrel water as needed...because it's a lot of work to live off grid, you automate what you can.

Mass spectrometry needs tons of precision for the very reason that you're not going to get more out than you put in, in that regard. Most designs don't actually run in the stable region, just real close to it, so that they have better selectivity - even the right particles are eventually lost.

I'm not actually trying to reject anything here - I'm just trying to get some of the "beams" going back and forth - the desired but never before actually seen "recirculation" to cause collisions - I'm not really making a particle trap per se - if they all went the same direction or whirled around a central spot as in some other designs, it'd be like hoping for high speed collisions on a one way street..

Trapping and hoping random motions due to thermalization give fusion is something Rider's thesis showed cannot work with electrostatics. It's a pretty good paper, and it shows a bunch of things wrong with fusor type designs = I've been using it as an anti-guide. If he proves it can't work, then I'll look for another way....and they seem to exist so far. It's just no one thought it through, the ease of just putting a big power supply and some gas in a vacuum system to get "any" fusion has led everyone to skip looking at the hard stuff.

If you want a trap and thermalization you want a tokamak or stellarator, and guys with lots more resources than we have already are trying that.
Of course, they're basing their estimates of Q on DT, and not paying attention to what 16 MeV neutrons are going to do to the reactor materials...

If you're going to make a mass spec, get that book I gave the ISBN for - it'll save you time better than cost I'll bet. It speaks extensively to the tradeoffs between stability and resolution, which helped give me the idea here.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
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