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John Fenley Introducion

Posted: Mon May 11, 2015 5:52 pm
by John Fenley
My name is John Fenley. I have been interested in fusion since I was in highschool in 1995. I went to Timpview highschool, in Provo Utah.

My first ideas were based on tiny needle-like pistons compressed hydraulically. Then I thought that I might be able to use a cloud of electrons to pull hydrogen in. I thought that if I could get a bunch of electron beams to cross, that I could have a virtual electrode. When describing this to my highschool physics teacher (Mr. Bangerter) he directed me toward Farnsworth fusors. He was very supportive of my wild theories about many things.

I started looking at other types of fusion, and became enamored with the magnetic bottle. I read a lot about Tokamaks, and played with an online Tokamak simulator until I found a combination of settings that seemed to break it with high energy. My later device ideas focused on how to overcome the problems I saw in the Fusor model. I saw too many places for energy loss, and it lacked a certain elegance that I thought a Fusion reactor should have. I attempted to overcome these with magnetic fields, and other tricks, but couldn't.

Around 10 years ago I came up with my most elegant design. It was a set of Helmholtz coils connected in series with a spark gap through a cylindrical vessel. my plan was to build up charge until it sparked through the gas. it would generate a plasma with a z-pinch while generating a pulsed confining field. I saw that it probably wouldn't work as well as I hoped, and was stuck for a long time.

Recently, while contemplating a device in the book "the execution channel" and watching a 10 minute long HD video of the sun, I had a Eureka moment.

I have a new design based on a cyclotron. The device uses a relatively weak uniform magnetic field along the axis of a cylindrical vacuum chamber. A diffuse Deuterium gas is introduced. An energizing beam, most likely an electron beam is pulsed into the chamber along the central axis of the cylinder at the cyclotron frequency. As deuterium is ionized and energized, it will follow a trajectory that should bring it back into the path of the electron beam in time for the next pulse. This should create an oscillating population of ions with high energy collisions happening down the axis of the device. End confinement is achieved by charged plates in a penning trap configuration. Fusion byproducts may be removed by fluctuating electrical fields at the edge of the device when the deuterium is at the center because other ions will cycle through the center on a different schedule.

I have talked with several physicists and many other individuals about this design. I plan to build a small scale test device in the next few months.

I also intend to file for a patent on this device unless there is prior art. The intent behind a patent is that I would require a portion of the profit from commercial reactors to be collected and distributed evenly to all humans on earth.

I call it a Fenley Fusor.

Re: John Fenley Introducion

Posted: Mon May 11, 2015 6:10 pm
by Richard Hull
Welcome. As we say here, the proof is in the doing. Good luck

Richard Hull

Re: John Fenley Introducion

Posted: Tue May 12, 2015 2:20 pm
by John Futter
John Welcome
Check out Chris Bradly's epicyclotron
Use the search function on this site

Re: John Fenley Introducion

Posted: Wed May 13, 2015 8:41 pm
by John Fenley
Thank you for that information about the Epicyclotron.

While on the surface, the Epicyclotron might be similar, the ideas are radically different.
I'm not sure that the electrode arrangement of the Epicyclotron adds much to a regular cyclotron, but he is attempting to create stable orbits of ions, and any scattering is handled by returning the ions to the device through an electrical potential... I.E. Brute force.

Figure 12 of the Epicyclotron patent appears to demonstrate a configuration that would exhibit the effect I propose, but I anticipate that any promising fusion effects would be quenched by the electrical meddling he does to try to control the ions. If he were to build the device in this configuration, and at the time of collision shut off the electrodes, then there is a chance of producing the effect I propose.

The entire idea behind my device is that since scattering is the most likely collision scenario for D-D collisions, I embrace this. Any ion that experiences a scattering collision at the focus of the device, must return to the focus again after one cyclotron period. There is only one option for them... Keep returning to the focus, and scattering there again and again until they happen to fuse.

Re: John Fenley Introducion

Posted: Sun May 17, 2015 11:24 pm
by Garrett Young
John,

Are you saying that the axial beam of electrons will form a virtual cathode? Have you calculated what quantity of trapped electrons you will need in order to create a sufficiently large potential.

As a side note, your post in this forum would be considered public disclosure (as would any conversations you had that weren't covered by a non-disclosure agreement). You may want to investigate some of the new patent laws enacted under the America Invents Act (AIA).

Re: John Fenley Introducion

Posted: Mon May 18, 2015 6:02 am
by John Fenley
Thanks for the question, and the pointer to the patent law changes due to the AIA.

First the question. I'm not attempting to overcome the Brillouin limit that way. The paper for the Penning Fusion Experiment hints that this limit can be overcome through a variance in space or time. My device uses time.

The electron beam should be at an energy that has a high probability of scattering off of Deuterium ions. It exists only to add kinetic energy to the Deuterium ions. It is pulsed at the cyclotron frequency so that any ions that are in it's path once must circle around, due to the uniform magnetic field, and be in it's path again the next time it pulses.

If you were to ignore all the time the electron beam is off (think strobe light effect), what you would see is a filament of hot ions down the center of the device along the path of a continuous electron beam, but they are unable to move out of it's path. In reality they are leaving that line, then circling back after one period.

Next the AIA. I was unaware that the rules had changed, but it still looks like I can apply for a patent within one year. It also seems like it might work as prior art to prevent anyone else from filing a patent on this. This is just my cursory analysis from the wikipedia article on the AIA, so I may be wrong...

It does appears that I may have forfeited my European patent rights by disclosing this design here. Honestly it probably wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for this to be public domain if it does indeed work. It would just be nice if I could get rich in the process.