Reply To: Brain: dualism of consciousness.

[zapkitty]

Francisl wrote: I work in an industry that uses about 200 tons per day of coal for combined heat and power. We use about 5 MW of electricity from our generators and the rest of the heat is used to produce steam. It would be nice to have DPF units that could produce equivalent results. I’m guessing that the electrical coils in the front of the device could provide our electricity and the x-rays coming from the back of the machine could produce our heat. This could be a simpler and more robust design for many industries.

As I understand it the the device produces opposing beams of electrons and ions. The electrons are supposed to be reabsorbed by the plasma and increase the temperature and thus the fusion yield. The ions are to be captured by coils and thus provide the electrical power for the next pulse.

The x-rays are not emitted as a beam but are generated by the plasma pinch in a fairly spherical wavefront that must be captured and put to work as the net power part of the device.

The current plan is to use a version of the photoelectric process tailored to x-rays as x-rays are “just” very energetic photons.

In addition the “standard” 5MWe unit is supposed to produce roughly about 5MWt, which can be either used or discarded..

A notable difference… at this point with gas turbines or other power plants a Heat Recovery Steam Generator is used to reclaim some of the heat from the exhaust of the plant in order to provide additional electrical power…. but with a fusion generator setup that HRSG unit would be bulkier and much more expensive than just buying an additional fusion unit to provide whatever additional power you need 🙂