Instrumented feedback! Key to fusor operation.

If you have a question about this topic, the answer is probably in here!
Post Reply
User avatar
Richard Hull
Moderator
Posts: 14991
Joined: Fri Jun 15, 2001 9:44 am
Real name: Richard Hull

Instrumented feedback! Key to fusor operation.

Post by Richard Hull »

Both star mode and real fusion demands a condition of delicately balanced stasis. Neither desideratum is achieved at high pressures or deep vacuum. Both are achieved only with critical voltages, currents and pressures that hover in and about an operational "sweet spot". This optimum condition, where fusion occurs, is only achieved through continued operation due to an experienced hand operating a well designed and constructed vacuum and power system over which a high degree of control and fully instrumented feedback to the operator allows such control to be achieved and held over a useful span of time.

A fusor must not be allowed to have any extreme fluctuations in any of its critical operational parameters, thus the term stasis, but more to the point, a "sweet spot", is instantly recognized and controlled by the experienced hand. I have discussed this at length in many FAQs and past postings.

In any critically designed computer control system designed to achieve fusison, feedback data is key. The computer controls and keeps fusion going via numerous feed back signals from very expensive digital/analog electronics and sensors designed to sense all the key parameters, voltage current, pressure and the key nuclear instrumentation that heralds fusion. Key to this digital control is a number of complex, empircally determined, hysteresis loops to contain and prevent huge control swings due to corrective control efforts creating delays or unusual situations due to over or under control efforts.

Few, if any here at fusor.net, can afford or even hope to connect and program a digitally controlled fusor system. It is mostly a matter of money, regardless of many who might have an advanced skill set grouping in all of the technologies involved.

All successful fusioneers in the past have chosen the human engine as their meat eating, caniverous control system with a limited but talented brain to substitute for the cold digital computer control device so often desired in modern systems. With a meat eating intelligent controller, super expensive, highly calibrated, electronic feedback sensors and controls are not needed. Only the basic, less expensive sensors that can be read by the analog human eye and interpreted by slow neuron reponses in the brain to command a hand turning a knob on a power supply or vacuum throttle valve are needed. However, these sensors are needed!!!!!!

Without minimal electronic sensors and numerous hand operated controls, any hope of reaching the sweet spot using the human eye-brain-hand "feedback" interaction, will never form. We must have that all important feedback loop. If the feedback loop is not there, the already elusive fusion sweet spot fades into an uncontrolled slap-dash effort that usually ends in frustration and failure.

You must equip yourself with:

1. An adequate, well controlled power supply sufficient to reach both fusion voltages and supply needed fusion current. This supply MUST be fully metered to read both current and voltage.
2. A really good vacuum system capable of hitting at least 10e-4 torr in the chamber, or better, while continuously pumping. This system must have an accurate electronic vacuum gauge with a readout capable of reading pressures in at least the 5-20 micron range.
The system must also have a throttle valve capable of adjusting the fusor chamber's operational pressure against pumping and in-flowing deuterium gas to a very stable pressure range of 5-20 microns.
3. For fusion, a stable, dry, deuterium gas supply that contains a micro leak valve in its line to control the rate of deuterium admitted into the fusor chamber. Air, argon, nitrogen, etc., can be used if "star mode" in a demo fusor is the goal. (non-fusion)
4. A neutron detection system that is proof against many false detect signals which is capable of detection of a relatively weak neutron flux in the range of 10e1 and 10e2 n/sqcm/sec in such a way that complex statistics resulting in low sigmas are not the norm. (You do not want a detection system where you must drag a few hopeful detect pulses from a mountian of noise.)

Any one of the above systems and criteria missing in your fusor, just might doom your effort to failure. You must establish a minimal feedback loop of sensors that allow you, as the control engine, to develop techniques and human based hysteresis control that can obtain and hold a fusion operational stasis point over time needed to take meaningful data.

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
Post Reply

Return to “FAQs: Fusor Construction & Operation”