Fusion Message Board

In this space, visitors are invited to post any comments, questions, or skeptical observations about Philo T. Farnsworth's contributions to the field of Nuclear Fusion research.

Subject: Re: Fusion reaction rates
Date: Dec 21, 6:18 pm
Poster: Jim Lux

On Dec 21, 6:18 pm, Jim Lux wrote:

>
>Also a key thing which Jim pointed out...Remember, you won't detect but a tiny fraction of the neutrons with any counter and thus you must be intimate with the neutron detector. As I have noted before many times, neutron counting is a black art.
>
>Where does this leave you and the origianl question? There is little math, that will assist you. If you compute the theoretical fusion rate t using the best math, you will find a tremndous shortfall in production. You will have to build it and try, with good instrumentation, to discover the constants for the given system. These operational constants are only found by the doing.
>

The other thing the math does for you is allow you to estimate (!) the change from a change in parameters.. For instance, you can expect that if you measure a neutron rate of X with 10 mA, then you should be measuring a neutron rate of 2X with 20 mA. Likewise, as you jack up the voltage, you move around on the cross section curve. WIth enough points, you can probably figure out what voltage in your apparatus corresponds to what voltage on the cross section curve....

Use the equations and tables for guides, then do the experiment and measure it yourself... Unless you have a big supercomputer handy, in which case you can probably do some decent monte carlo analysis. I note that lots of those IEC papers do a lot of handwaving to get from 2D low-res simulations to actual behavior.