Reply To: A new way of generating electricity

[jamesr]

Aeronaut wrote: Most of that went over my head, James. Am I correct in understanding that the ion heating effect you described could possibly apply to the describing and predicting the plasma temperature/ energy level at any point during the axial phase?

most of the heating in the axial phase will still, I think be due to the compression (roughly adiabatic) and and resistive heating. but when you get to the point where the field get so twisted, you can get a release of the energy that is stored in those twists by the field reconfiguring (snapping & reconnecting) with another part of the field to effectively undo the twists.

This heating mechanism though does not accelerate the particles adiabatically, instead you get some ions/electrons with much higher energies.