Reply To: A new way of generating electricity

[Brian H]

jamesr wrote:

Second, temperature is measured in electron volts, and tiny-ness is FF’s friend

I’m not quite sure how you think the units you measure something in suddenly changes the physics of what going on, but I get your general point.

On a separate topic, one thing I came across today in a talk about astrophysical plasmas, was that in magnetic reconnection (ie where a a twisted or opposing field changes topology), the release of magnetic energy to the particles causes them to be accelerated to supra-thermal speeds. This mechanism of heating ions & electrons as the plasmoid forms could play a crucial role in the dynamics. In that you cannot consider the plasma in the plasmoid as it forms to have a specific temperature, as such, because the dynamic have forced it well out of a Maxwellian thermal distribution. The density and collisionality of the plasma probably means it will thermalise again within a very short time, so it may be insignificant, but then again this seed population of fast ions could propote more fusion, or on the other hand a population of fast electrons created by this process could promote extra bremsstrahlung & have a negative effect.

It seems the more I learn about plasma physics the less you can predict by simple analysis. The only way to really tell is to do a non-linear simulation to test the hypothesis, and even then it only tells you about the particular instabilities/modes that can be accounted for in whatever simplified model you are using.
Yes, I didn’t want to get explicitly into discussing the reason eV are more informative and less “frightening” than talking about billions°, but rather just to communicate that in a very tiny space the energy level of the agitated particles involved was much more plausible and attainable than raising the entire volume of a typical containment vessel’s plasma to such a temp. That is a classic measure of “difficulty” of initiating and maintaining any particular species of fusion, and the basis, it seems to me, of many meso-fusion experts’ skepticism. Which abounds.

As for the brehmstrahlung, I assume you have read the patent and are generally familiar with the claim that Eric et al are making that there is a target quantum gap in which the ‘thermal’ (which I understand to mean essentially ‘by collision’) energy transmission to electrons–which results in X-Ray Band photon emission–does not occur, a kind of notch of opportunity to be exploited. This permits the process to sidestep the “X-ray cooling” standard theory predicts will squelch the p-B11 fusion process long before it can attain unity. (BTW, have you spent any time checking out the proposed X-Scan version of the FoFu, as discussed on the LPP site? It uses a “detuned” generator to produce an X-Ray beam for external scanning of structures, etc.)

And the simulations, 1- and 2-D, etc., which Eric et al were working with were necessarily, I am sure, simplifications. And the only way to tell if the core of what they were trying to demonstrate and extrapolate is real, is real-world plasma-pounding. That is why I made the point that so far, better than ‘so good’; results exceed predictions.

I am definitely not up on the detailed theory or calculations, JR, and admit it openly. Nor do I ‘grok’ the details of Eric’s fundamental disagreement with the Standard Model and astrophysics about the primacy of magnetic phenomena over gravitational ones on the macro scale, and how that translates into nano-scale events. But I observe that this is the bet which is being made, and that it has (to my mind) the pattern and shape of a winning one. And results seem to reinforce that more and more as this “proof of concept” process proceeds.

Whether the results to date explicitly support the “notch” analysis, I don’t know. But I suspect that at the very least they have failed to invalidate it.