Henning wrote: Silicon and Silicone are completely different stuffs. One’s the element, the other one is the rubber. And I don’t remember reading anything in the patent application about them as coolants. They are both not useful here anyway. Both consisting of Si (Silicon) with an atomic number of 14, so pretty opaque to x-rays.

Lithium on the other hand melts at 180° and boils at 1342°C. With Decaborane melting at 99°C and boiling at 213°C, that makes Lithium a pretty good candidate. Also with its 3 protons, that’s pretty much invisible to x-rays – even better than the surrounding Beryllium.

Thanx for the insights, Henning, especially about how the protons affect opacity.

I got the idea for the silicone coolant from the patent in section 29, paragraph 3 (last section before the claims), which says “In the case of the X-ray conversion system, however, care must be taken to avoid blocking the X-rays or electrons with the coolant itself by passing an electrically non-conducting coolant, such as silicone, through several dozen very narrow pairs of plates, all oriented radially toward the plasmoid.” So yes, it does attenuate X-rays.

Eric’s focus is on selling cheap electricity using an elegant solution to recovering Bremstrahlung X-rays. This locks him into berylium/helium which limits the thermal output.

My focus is on selling cheap heat- hopefully enough to flash into super-heated ~3000F steam suitable for replacing coal-fired baseload generator boilers using only 1 or 2 FFs in series. I know this is ridiculous to us, but it’s easier for business and political leaders ( golden rule ) to visualize in use and threatens fewer jobs while offering the potential to create LOTS of jobs.

So I’m not worried about the X-rays, except how to jack B so high that the X-rays don’t figure significantly in the machine’s energy budgets. B is a function of anode radius, so using Titanium in this scenario should give derivatives of my design process a lot more maneuvering room.

Many universities, such as Cornell and Michigan State University, use a combined heat and power plant but still have enormous coal bills that can be leveraged to minimize the apparent business risk to present to alumni to get private funding for at least one DPF lab. This way they wouldn’t threaten government funding for DT fusion research. Dang, this para probably belongs in a different category!

As you can see in anode.pdf, the end of the heat pipes are going to be part of the anode circuit, so I need to find a suitable non-conducting coolant that can be moved fast enough to handle whatever heat an engineering lab can send down the pipe.

edit- reading the sintering article 🙂