Reply To: Fusion Oil

[pschmidt]

Tulse wrote:

What other technology might replace capacitors in this application?

How about a focus fusion device? When a FF fires, would the pulse it produces be short enough to get another FF to fire? If so you could daisy chain the suckers, and just need a set of caps to get things rolling. It’s not perpetual motion exactly, but…

🙂

From what I understand, the caps can charge/discharge at 500KHz. The FoFu device is expected to operate at 200Hz or less (for heat dissipation reasons.) It is therefore possible to multiplex multiple FoFu devices with fast switching (in theory >1000). However, the amount of heat that would produce is daunting. You might also find new physical limitations in the caps – I highly doubt anyone has actually driven these caps that hard.

From what I understand of the early estimates, 5MW of solid-state output electricity will also result in somewhere around 7MW of waste heat. If you had 10, you would generate 50MW of electricity, but have 70MW of heat to get rid of. With jet engines, this is naturally expelled out of the back of the engine. With the FoFu in a plane (for example), you’d have to vent this heat. (I have no idea how much heat jet engines generate compared to this, but I recall a modern 747 as having engines that can generate something like 150MW of force. I don’t know how much heat they generate.) An interesting idea would be to design a turbofan with its FoFu unit(s) built into the front or rear of it so the force of the thrust is also used to vent the heat.

It is amusing to contemplate that it may be possible to build a multiplexed system to generate a 5GW power plant using a single capacitor bank as a primary buffer. I suspect the switching requirements for this are impractical. Also, there are very few applications where extremely high power output from a single source would be a better idea than localizing the power generation in smaller units. (Fault tolerance, etc.)