An introduction to my project; the 'epicyclotron'.

[Chris Bradley]

I've been here a while, so this is intended an introduction of my project, rather than me, though one thing goes with the other. For the benefit of the many new members since I joined the forum 4 years ago I'll mention that I am a professional engineer based in UK with a background in EMC and environmental testing, having been a Research Fellow in computational electro-magnetics (and a too-convoluted-to-mention career progression before that!).

When I came to this forum in May 2008 my project was already under-way, but as I was doing something quite different to a fusor and had only just begun to assemble a physical experiment, I was unable to say with any confidence or authority what the physical experiment was likely to end up looking like, let alone what it would do. It is obvious to say, but not always 'self-evident', that if you're undertaking something never done before then neither you nor anyone else can discuss it authoritatively! So I've left it until now, but have some interesting stuff to show which I'm going to disseminate over the next few months as I have just about reached the limit of how far I can go with it at the moment. The whole project will be going into storage boxes pretty soon, due to personal/family reasons, and what its long term future will be I can't say.

I have discussed and promoted the idea of what I'm doing over the years. I'll leave that for a dedicated theory thread on the topic to go through that again, and/or simply point to this previous discussion which I felt captured the essence of what I am trying to do:

download_thread.php?site=fusor&bn=fusor ... 1227208869

The thing is, how I have sought to implement this idea in the experiment I am introducing here is not necessarily the only way to implement that idea. This experiment is what I've done to see if I can get it working.

The idea itself came to me in ~1985. I was at school and we had had three particular topics in a row: thermal velocities in gases, electric motors and nuclear energy. We were told that fusion energy was still being experimented with after decades and it had not yet been 'solved' because the hot gas could not be contained. Those two preceding lessons made me wonder whether it was possible to 'improvise' on thermal energy by simply accelerating particles electrically, and so with the electric motor lesson fresh in my mind I conceived of this experiment, and what you see below. Keeping particles spinning around in circles at MHz speeds in a motor-like arrangement seemed like an 'obvious' possibility to try out to help 'the fusion energy problem', given that particular sequence of lessons!

I harboured that idea for years, slowly learning more about whether/how it might work and occasionally presented it to various folks for a 'dusting off', but with only cursory interest back. In 2007 I decided I might as well see if I could file it as a patent application, at least as a way to preserve the idea. As I wrote that patent application, it dawned on me that I had learned enough by then, and with ebay punting lots of 2nd hand gear, that there was a chance I could just get on and build it for myself, than carry on hoping to meet others that could help me do it.

So I did an internet trawl for inspiration, to see how far others had got with such amateur efforts, and at that point I came across fusor.net ! The parallels with my own idea did not escape me. So I could see that it was possible to do this much, but wasn't sure if the additional complexity of my experiment would be possible. 'Fortuna audaces iuvat', as they say, so I've given it a go …..

The patent was granted by the USPTO in March 2012, and in the UK some months earlier. Bear in mind that I filed it in 2007 .. this is how long both took to examine it! It was allowed on its very first examination (no mean feat for a pro se application – that's rare even for professional patent attorneys!) so the delay has been all USPTO's.

My patent is not written in 'patentese', at least I intended it to read as a 'technical report' though it can be quite terse at times. I did my best to make it readable. The first-time success of my application was because I spent months reading through the examiners notes on other applications on similar patent applications (both successful and unsuccessful) in the USPTO 'PAIR' system, and could see what they wanted in an application, and what they trashed! (I recommend anyone contemplating filing their own patent to also do this.) They don't want all the flannel-talk you tend to associate with patents, it's clear they just want to see something written in plain English that has specific, distinct and unambiguous original claims, that is 'enabled' in having sufficient instructions that someone else could build it without too much additional research, and that there's no particular reason that the laws of physics says it won't work!

Well, you can judge for yourself... I put a copy in the 'files' section.

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=8024#p57428

I've called the invention an 'epicyclotron'. (I originally called it an 'epitrokotron' on account of the predicted epitrochoidal orbits of the ions, but that sounded a mouthful! 'epicyclotron' is still a unique term.)

I'll pick up on the theoretical stuff in the patent when I come to show the experimental results, as this is the intro forum. (If anyone wants to kick off their own discussion of it in another forum beforehand, feel free to add to the older threads, or start a new one.)

In the meantime, this project has taken many 'side projects' to see it get to where it has got to. These are inevitably in common with a 'fusor'. In particular I think it might be particularly useful for fusor construction to show how I dealt with the inevitable issues of HV power supply, vacuum, and gas flow. Below is a photo-representation of how the whole experiment typically looks. I'm going to plug in a searchable reference in each thread for each element of what you can see in this photo as I write up the experiment over the next few months. So if you want to look up, e.g., how I built the power supply, item #5, then you can do a search for the phrase 'epicyclotron project #5' then you should get a hit on that - once I've written it!

[JamesC]

Amazing Journey.. Talk about a 'slow burner' but thats what it takes I think to even push the ball forward just a touch.

If I understand the fundamental 'Idea' correctly you are trying to setup a situation where D Ions at fusion energies are colliding with Deuterium Atoms. Ie Ion on Background. Whereby in a single shot the D ion both ionises the Deuterium atom and potentially fuses with it.

So the fundamental 'limit' of the idea as far as fusion is concerned is the probability of fusion of a D Ion on a D atom. So E(fusion) > DIonisation / Probability Fusion.

So Probability Fusion must be greater than 3.65Mev / 14.9ev ~= 1 in 245,000

What were your estimates of the Probability of Fusion of a D ion with a DBackground Atom.

Is it always necessary that a D+ ion colliding with a D Background atom will always result in an ionisation? ie is it every possible to get a free shot?

Great work Chris, I always follow your posts with interest. A bit sad to hear your circumstance will force you to put it aside for a while.

Best of Luck,
James Caska

[John Futter]

Well done Chris
maybe two of these intersected, one clockwise, one anticlockwise would make a novel beam on beam device??

[George Schmermund]

Chris - That was quite a coup to get approval from the USPTO without having to deal with any office actions! I know what it's like to write one's own patents and it's no small achievement. It's good to see that real innovation is still happening in these forums.

[Dennis P Brown]

Congrats.

Word of caution - patents must be maintained (renewed) and these occur at odd times periods over the life of the patent (there is a date/fee schedule available - this, of course, is for US patents; if UK, don't know how that works at all) and they will not send any notes to you or a lawyer. If you miss a payment, you lose the patent. I learned this the hard way.

[Steven Sesselmann]

Chris,

I understand all too well how your ideas have driven you to complete this massive project over so many years, despite all the usual obstacles that crop up in ones life time, yet I admire your tenacity and determination that has seen your project get to this stage.

Very few people indeed could and would master such a broad range of skills.

Steven

[Richard Hull]

Nice piece of work Chris. Congratulation on sliding smoothly through the patent process, a really big accomplishment for sure. Nice bit of innovation there. I, too, am sorry you are going to have to put it away before doing fusion with it. We would like to have seen it fuse and hear about the relative efficiency while doing it. Keep us advised of anyhting that develops with the patent or your project.

Richard Hull

[Chris Bradley]

Thanks for the supportive comments. There's a little more life left in the project, prob into the New Year. Maybe I can keep it going even longer still, if I can, but my motivation for dissemination now is partly an act of self-discipline that I 'record' where I've got to before it's boxed up (I have been very poor at recording details of my progress, I've focussed on hunting down working configurations), and for you guys to throw any last minute experiments I might be able to manage to do into the pot.

James, thanks for your faithful interest. I did a broad-brush calculation in the patent document, like the one you suggest. Take a look at 'column 13, page 24/29'. I deliberately aimed to be 'modest', for fear of discrediting the idea from the start. In reality, this may well be around about the best reality - DD in this device looks like it would be very marginal if it works, even at 500keV operating condition, so it looks like it isn't going to break even but other reactions might work out. To claim anything further is clearly entering pixie-land at this stage. Again, this is patent-technique - I'm not going to make a direct claim for something I have no evidence for. It is sufficient to discuss energy gains as a 'theoretical prospect'.

John, for beams to come on to each other, head-to-head, do you not think they would be better to be rotating in the same direction? ... in fact, just like figures 12 and 13 of the patent document! The prospect of getting two beams head-to-head would clearly make a radical improvement to this idea if it can be made to work, the potential benefits are huge for this particular design, due to focussing at a given radius. The two beam can even be different species, operating at different radii. I was hoping to work out how I might get to build this configuration. It is still an option 'in the closing plan', at this stage.

Looking back, it was a mighty struggle through the USPTO all on my lonesome, and I do stop and wonder how I actually managed it!! Clearly, it's not impossible and I guess I'd do it again if I had to, but you gotta have your wits about you and read and re-read every rule and instruction they lay out. I did submit pre-examination revised claims before the application was actually examined because I realised over time the first ones were not up to scratch for allowance, but I had to take some advantage out of having my application held up for 4 years?!! The UK renew annually from the 5th year after filing, which meant I had to renew the patent as soon as it was granted! Hah! The US patent issue fee covers the first 3.5 years after date of grant. I'll probably renew it once. Not sure what'll happen after that, would it be worth keeping it renewed? There are many projects that seem to attract millions in funding and they can't even get a patent issued, nor barely get an experiment working - even with their millions!

But I can't say I'm particularly motivated of gravy-training on a shaky project. I'd like to get 'genuine' interest and funding for this idea, there is much more to be done that I'd like to do, but it's unclear to me if there is any good route for that, and how to go about it.

[Carl Willis]

Hi Chris,

Your project has reached a tantalizing degree of refinement. I hope it doesn't go into hibernation any time too soon.

What are / were your most immediate goals for assessing the idea? I'm guessing you had hopes of instrumenting the system in order to detect ion trapping, and ion energies, and I think you might have been working toward deuterium runs just to see if some neutrons shake out.

The hardest part in finding wider support for the project probably consists of showing through empirical data that it does effectively what you postulate it should as a confinement device. I'm unconvinced of that, but probably like a lot of observers, I have not thought long and hard about this particular situation.

Your craftsmanship and long-term attention to this project are commendable. I hope you'll be rewarded with some interesting findings before you have to pack up.

-Carl

[Chris Bradley]

My original intention was simply to visually show the predicted toroidal plasma trapping, and I felt that if I could accomplish that then that would be a pretty substantial outcome.

Well, I actually finished constructing the first version of the device on Christmas Eve, 2009, and operated it for the first time on Christmas Day. I was immediately confronted with what appeared to be a trapped toroidal plasma!

(Pretty much all my main work has been done in spurts during holiday times - it's the only time I've had available!!)

You may recall my original posting on this;

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=7852#p55811

The observations people made were fair enough so since then I have been building up the quality of the experiment (mainly improved ion focussing) along with performing some measurements. Diagnostics is limited and you are rightly targeting an inevitable weakness in amateur work and whether or not we can show, to a satisfactorily rigorous standard, what we would want to show.

In any case, I took your suggestion (in that thread) of measuring the power-up current profile, and I also managed to rig up a Langmuir probe measurement, and later in 2010 I obtained measurements for that experiment, such as those below.

These measurements are tantalising indeed, and appeared to be showing an IV gradient of ~ln/1600V (with 3300V applied, seemed to be suggesting a plasma potential of a half of the applied maximum potential?), and of the order of >10uC of charge trapping (with curious and very slow periodicity, maybe so slow it is out-gassing behaviour?), which, just like the toroidal trapping, was not inconsistent with the experimental predictions. To note, this was a DC applied potential without an enforced rotational frequency, though a rotational component is expected nonetheless due to ExB behaviour.

At first I didn't understand the measurement you were trying to get me to make. Measuring the input current on an oscilloscope, on a short time base, just gave me what appeared to be a FSD switch-on spike. It was a while before I realised the device was taking *whole seconds* to settle down to a steady-state current, rather than ms! I had to use a data-logger, rather than a 'scope, to record this profile!

But, still, though I was satisfied something interesting was happening and I could move on from looking for evidence of trapping to figuring how to make use of that trapping, I wasn't sure what others would make of the results. So what I've done since then is just get on with more experiments when the opportunity arises, and I've 'scoured the parameter space' of electrode design and operating parameters to see what I could find. There's still more to do, but I don't think I'm going to complete everything that I might want done.

One thing to say up front, though, is that I've not yet found convincing neutron counts with deuterium present at the operating voltages my device is capable of (and in part I was rather expecting I might not reach that condition as the ion energies are low and limited by the device size and magnetic field strength) but I do now have plenty of physical evidence of ion acceleration and trapping, which was the original objective to demonstrate, and I'll be feeding out those results during this dissemination phase.

I have one further build possible that I have been planning for a while and this should double the available magnetic field, which I think may put the ion energies up far enough to be in contention for fusion. The question is whether I will have time enough to complete this new build (and also whether I can figure a way to construct the new build with the 30mm x 60mm (diameter) neo magnet I have for the purpose, without loosing fingers on the way!)

I hope that addresses your questions for now on the background of the work. More will come later, outside this intro forum.

[Edward Miller]

Great work Chris and congrats on the patent! Always great to see novel techniques. Very inspiring.

[Chris Bradley]

I'd just like to round off this introduction to the project by explaining that I've been extremely poor (in my own records) at recording everything I've done. I hope this dissemination will go some way towards correcting that.

But in part that was intentional. I don't think I'm doing a big bit of science here, I'm not proffering that there are any new mechanisms yet undiscovered that I have some unique handle or vision on. I view it more as an 'engineers solution' to biasing those bad fusion odds in a favourable direction by pulling up the scattered particles by their bootstraps so they stay in the 'fusion-race'.

To this end, I have been racing through many different configurations of setup and electrodes to see what works well and what doesn't. I've not been interested in the things that didn't work out. I know it's good in science to record the failures too, but my aim has been to nail the 'engineering' of this thing and if I had hung around exploring each avenue to its bitter end then I'd have only done a tenth of what I've managed to do.

In fact, had this been an academic project then I expect it'd have cost a few $100k and have achieved a fraction, because each stage would have had to be reviewed and catalogued and documented, etc.. The 'amateur' research dollar is much more powerful than an academic dollar, though it may not leave behind quite the archival legacy unless it 'strikes lucky'. I have a box stuffed full of trial electrodes, some worked, some didn't, and some were re-engineered so quickly that I didn't even get to take photos of them before I stripped them down and started something new!!! That'd just not have happened in a 'real' project, which'd probably have got through one or two electrode combinations in the same time period.

Actually, there have been few surprises in the way the kit behaves, it has done pretty much what is likely predict it would do, in each iteration and improvement over the years. What has been surprising sometimes is how well, or badly, it worked rather whether it did or not. As you will see, soon, the thing is good at axial focussing, poor at focussing at a given radius and [as it is at the moment] surprisingly bad at producing neutrons!!! But there's a story behind even that disappointing statistic which I think usefully shows the way to go with it. I'll fill out this story in good time, but aiming just to keep it an introduction here. I'll probably tend to aim to bias my time on actual experimental work until it's pack-up time, so some stuff might not get a full discussion 'til then.

Whether I have approached what I've done in the 'right' or 'wrong' way, you can be the judge of. The 'archival' nature of this work is now embedded in the patent, and perhaps in the results I'll be pinning up here.

Thank you all for your support of this work, both for the kind comments here and challenging observations in the forum, and also for the behind-the-scenes email correspondence on certain topics over the years.

[Chris Bradley]

Just to add... if anyone wishes to try building this for themselves, then outside the US and the UK the patent has no effect at all. They are at liberty to experiment with it, and even sell it and profit from it, if they can commercialise it somehow!

In the UK they are free to experiment with it as much as they like, but are barred from using it for commercial activities, or in the preparation of a commercial activity, without a licence from me (which they can come ask me about easily enough!).

In the US, the rules, as far as I understand them, are that no-one can even experiment with it let alone undertake commercial activities without getting the say-so from me.

Naturally, I'm entirely happy for any amateurs, anywhere, to see if they can build it for themselves and no-one here should feel under any restriction to try it out as a non-commercial experiment at their own expense. If you want to be assured that I won't change my mind half-way through your experiment, feel free to email me and I will formally put that in writing for you!

But please understand that my epicyclotron is an experimental design and I have yet to figure out its range of behaviour, even for myself! I cannot guarantee any form of outcome for you. As far as I can tell, charge exchange and fast neutral losses are high and I cannot tell if I will be able to hit the pressures and vacuum purity with my own kit at which it would work fully as predicted. (I did mention limitations from charge-exchange in the patent, but it looks like I underestimated their impact on its operation in the pressure ranges I can reach.)