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I don’t have any inside knowledge to answer your question directly, but I suspect efforts are currently focused on setting up, calibrating and reducing the noise on all the diagnostics. Its pointless trying to tweak anything else to improve the performance until you have good measurments of, for example, ion temperature.

Also I gather there is also a lot of work going into getting ready to reconfigure the device to work with decaborane, and all the headaches that go with that.

The deuterium phase is pretty much about getting the entire system calibrated and functioning as designed, so that the theory can be tested and hopefully proved in a fuel which most fusion researchers are very familiar with. The decaborane is almost sure to present its own learning curve, with unity or over-unity operation as the prize. For that reason, I’m not looking at yield as much as challenges solved and challenges outstanding. Come mid to late September I’d expect to see the decaborane at least beginning to pay its way on the yield charts.

Hi MTd2. It’s nice to hear you’ve been following our work. The Time vs. Energy graph represents where we have been and where we want to be by the end of the year, but progress is not expected to be linear. There has been a delay as we are upgrading the switches and trigger system, which you can read about in the “July Switch Update” article. I’m very happy with the progress this year, even with the occasional delay, and I’m still confident in our projections. By the end of September, we’ll have a much better picture of where we stand and what we can expect by the year’s end. Until then, the team is lowering electrical noise, calibrating instruments, and all that “mundane” work that is absolutely vital to progress. It is also appropriate to prepare for pB11 testing because it is just around the corner, but we need to have the diagnostic suite ready before we can make the switch from deuterium.

Brian, without going into details or complicated formulas, the pinches are not “hot” enough yet, but the extrapolations are there. However, pB11 is a completely different animal than deuterium.

Pretend energy break even is hitting a home run. To get a home run, you have to have a ball, a bat, and a batter. The batter has to swing hard enough, the bat has to make contact with the ball at just the right angle and time, and the ball has to be tough enough and aerodynamic enough to travel over the wall. Up until now, we’ve fired with deuterium at less than full voltage on less than all capacitors at less than full synchronization and without full diagnostics. That’s like swinging with one arm using a plastic bat on a whiffle ball while half blindfolded. Obviously you wouldn’t expect to knock it out of the park under those circumstances, but you can measure the speed of the bat, timing of the hit, angle of flight, etc, and figure out what it will take with a real bat and ball at full power and synchronization, optimal timing, etc.

With that said, and as bad as that may sound, the results we have gotten are very encouraging, and we’re only getting started. We’re at the cutting edge of this research. With the upgraded switches, we should have vastly improved performance by having all capacitors discharge, with better synchronization, at higher voltages. We’ve barely started to test the effects of the angular momentum coil or the magnetic field effect, so we really can’t say just how much those will ultimately improve the results. We’re also getting all the diagnostic instruments installed and the noise eliminated, so we can better see what’s going on, effectively taking off the blindfold. As for finding the “sweet spots”, well, that’s what batting practice is all about. 🙂 We’ve got to get in there and start swinging. I’m very optimistic that by late September, we’ll have some newsworthy results. When all the pieces come together at the right time and place, that’s when things get interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLT