#11316
jamesr
Participant

While I applaud your enthusiasm, I’m not sure you really get how fusion works. You mention half way through (08:00) that you don’t consider the ion collisions as the cause of fusion! It is all about this!

ions need to be travelling fast enough that, if they happen to be on a collision path, that their kinetic energy will be able to overcome the electrostatic repulsion of their positive charges until they are close enough for the strong force to take over (or at least close enough for them to have a quantum probability of tunnelling through the remaining potential barrier)

If you are to get an appreciable number of fusion reactions then you need the plasma dense enough. If it is this dense (at the bottom of the potential well) then since most of the collisions will be elastic scattering at small angles, the plasma will begin to ‘thermalise’.
Of all the scattering collisions, some ions will end up with more energy & some with less. The ones with more can escape the potential well, some will then hit the grid or walls of the chamber, leaving just the ‘cool’ ones trapped

You can keep it hot by supplying ‘even hotter’ ions at the 100keV or so your power supply can deliver but the energy needed to do this will always be huge in comparison to the fusion rate.

Do you have any estimated figures of density & velocity distribution vs radial position?