Reply To: Fusion Oil

[Milemaster]

Zapicky:ming

You are stating a couple of very interesting engineering problems to tackle. Here are my thoughts of the steps we could take to solve them.

A) Are you intending to have these “cylinders” of fuel plasma conduct the power to drive the formation of the sheath?
Yes the idea is to replace the electrodes by the plasma cylinder. No erosion inside the chamber means less contamination of the fuel but most relevant problem we intend to solve is the shut down of the lasers simultanuosly with the capacitor discharge would achieve a pre firing of all the electrodes surrounding the cathode,

B) Then the fuel for the pinch would be in addition to the “electrodes”?
As a mather of fact, I was thinking that the fuel would be pumped in the chamber as electrodes not as an addition to another intake of fuel.

C) Then are you just shifting the erosion to the physical electrodes supplying the current to the plasma within the beams?
Its a matter of design. Even if there is a remaining corrosion in the interface between plasma and the electrode, it could be shifted outside of the chamber to a better serviceable zone. I could think of a relatively large copper solid pipe conducting the fuel to the chamber’s top plate but electrically isolated from it.
A minuscule hole in the center lodges the gas. This configuration allows a greater surface contact. The discharge would be made trough the external pipe.

D) And what will that pB plasma external to the confinement beams do to them?
Really I would try to minimize unconfined gas. Even with the plasma sheath formation, we could still steer the flow of gas with laser beams. Actually there is a diffuse gas and its reasonable to conclude that during the discharge there is formation of violent and chaotic turbulence that have not been taken in consideration. This produce transitory differences in pre in the plasma zone and outside and an overall loss of efficiency and the need of evacuation of all the Pb after the shot. If we are going to make a repeated firing machine, we need to reconsider the reduction of the loading and unloading of the gas.

E) Doesn’t seem to add up, so what am I missing?
Sure, at a first glance there are many questions to solve. As y begun this thread, we are at a stalemate, and the way to get out of it is thinking outside the box. And a lot of old fashioned brick and mortar, trial and error work is needed. But this is the way engineers do their job, and learn from the experience.

F) Another issue would seem to be that, unfortunately, none of the techniques you mention are scaled to the magnitude of current, pressure and temperature required for pre-pinch plasma.
Yes this is a very common limitation on breakthrough developments. Necessary but infant technologies are not available in the time span we have. Perhaps the engineering solutions proposed, requires techniques that are ahead of this time. But looking at the information of hollow lasers interactions with gases, there is nothing there that cannot be scaled. The setups I have seen for the lasers columns, are just table top devices in a lab. We can wait; we can pick up the job from there and create our costumed device or we continue with more available improvements (Like the beryllium electrodes mentioned as Eric’s choice) but remain vigilant of the progress of the hollow laser technology.