HENDO POLYWELL

[JamesC]

Anyhow* I backed the project to get myself a white-box. I plan to run some basic experiments by pointing a TV electron gun at it and seeing what happens. I will report back the experimental results but it will take a while, the white box's won't even ship until July 2015 and that's if they ship on schedule.

[Dan Tibbets]

In the Lenz law quote,eddy currents induced in the conductor- in this case the plasma may heat the plasma, but it would not aid confinement in a polywell. In a tokamak, with it's edge instabilities and various modes and techniques to control edge instabilities (eddies) locally applied or global warpage of magnetic fields, etc might be applied. This extremely complex and dynamic interaction may be necessary for tokamaks, but one of the key properties of the Polywell is that eddies/ edge instabilities are naturally suppressed due to the constant shape of the magnetic fields. This basic concept is basic to Polywell operation. It is true that this ideal condition may need to be manipulated, but not for containment. Electron injection is a big issue now and some dynamic time based variation in the fields either globally or locally, perhaps combined with POPS effects may be needed for both maintaining adequate confinement and efficient electron injection. Again, though, due to the tremendous speed of the electrons such timely modifications to the plasma behavior will probably be due to radio wave (microwave) input or curent/voltage variation of the electrodes. These can be changed rapidly. Even electromagnets consisting of just wires would have difficulty responding this fast due to inductance, hysteresis (?), and other effects, Electric motors with their rotating masses are even slower. In many ways the motors are stabilizing for a magnetic field. The inertia of the mass impedes rapid changes in the magnetic field. Variations over seconds or even milliseconds may be reasonable, but needed changes are more in the time scale of less than a microsecond.

Electric motors are associated with magnetic fields. Such fields could even have the geometry you wish. But, simple electromagnets without a rotor or moving mass does the same thing, probably more efficiently, and have faster (but still relatively slow) strength variation capabilities. There is no obvious reason to use electric motors as a magnetic field source in this application (that I know of).

Dan Tibbets