Reply To: Focus Fusion Rail Gun

[vlad]

kurtul mehtap wrote:

Two DPFs firing at each other is about 30 years old. The concept evolved into what is known as the hypocycloidal pinch. It has promise for increased pinch lifetime but the energy input is much greater.

The energy cost for PF device to accelerate particles is far greater than a particle accelerator. Medical applications will likely use advanced accelerator technology like plasma wakefield accelerator in the coming decade.

From the dense plasma pinch animation I assumed the direction of the resultant high energy ION Beam as a straight line. While the ION beam is directed outside the anode the electrons are going inside.
So 2 high energy ION beams can collide in the middle and potentially cause fusion.
That was my assumption.if it was so easy to make ions fuse on collision… then there would be no need for two DPF devices firing to each other
you could just just use any simple and cheap proton accelerator (just few kEv’s!) and fire with the proton beam at the boron target

Unfortunately it does not work, because cross-section (or just probability in simple words) of fusion reaction is very low.
You’ll get few fusion reactions, but they’ll give you just a very little part of energy you spend on accelerating the ions.

The problem of fusion is to confine hot ions together for some time so that they could collide many-many times until some significant amount of ions would fuse.