John Fenley Introducion
Posted: Mon May 11, 2015 5:52 pm
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.
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.