Reply To: Newbie pB11 Fuel Questions

[Allan Brewer]

NoSmoke wrote:
A thought on ion beam conversion efficiency:

It occurs to me that ions traveling through a coil to generate electricity might be analogous to wind passing through a wind turbine. Thing is though, the maximum possible efficiency for a wind turbine is about 59% ie. no more than 59% of the kinetic energy of the wind passing through the turbine’s swept area can be recovered (sometimes referred to as the “Betz law”).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz’_law

What is going on is that the wind must slow when it reacts with the turbine blades but cannot slow beyond a certain velocity as it must keep moving to get out of the way of the incoming wind behind it. It seems to me that a similar situation might exist for a stream of ions traveling down the annulus of a coil or past a coil for that matter. Maybe then the efficiency of ion to electrical energy conversion is similarly limited for the same reason??

That is an interesting analogy. Although it is indeed the kinetic energy which is being harvested from the ion beam there seem to me to be a couple of fundamental differences in our favour. Firstly the cross sections of the ion nuclei are approximately 1e-10 smaller than molecules, so that collisions of decelerated ions with “full speed” ions are much rarer, and secondly, partly-decelerated ions still produce a pro rata voltage in the coil and can theoretically, other things being equal, be decelerated by the induced current right down to zero velocity.