Reply To: Global Warming

[FrankOlson]

I see. I read the article on the plasma rail gun. Thanks guys. Between wikipedia and lecture 11, this is making a lot more sense to me than it did last week.

asymmetric_implosion,
You mentioned that the plasma focus circuit is a simple design on paper. It’s a capacitor in parallel with a cathode and an anode that is being gapped by a gaseous medium, essentially. Then the plasma sheath comes into play – it’s a complicated thing. So how would you represent the cathode and anode, as a resistor, capacitor, or inductor? I know there would be stray elements of each, just like in real world components. I just don’t know which would be the prevailing for this case. My guess is that it’s a capacitor until it begins experiencing a dielectric breakdown, hence the plasma, then the resistive element dominates as the actual ‘capacitor’ bank keeps discharging into the cathode and anode. But, I know once the plasma forms the resistance would probably drop since, from what I remember, the plasma is a low resistance element once formed. This all happens so fast besides, it’s just mind blowing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_forming

Lewin, Walter. 8.02 Electricity and Magnetism, Spring 2002. (MIT OpenCourseWare: Massachusetts Institute of Technology), http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-02-electricity-and-magnetism-spring-2002 (Accessed 23 Feb, 2014). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.