Reply To: I think the biggest transition that will shock the industry will be the need for Desalination Plants.

[Lerner]

First, I want to emphasize I am talking about two different situations—the generator pulsing 200Hz and our experiment, firing a few times an hour.
For the generator, I think that solid electrodes are possible. Cooling rates of 1 kW/cm^2 are considered achievable today. At 3500 K, blackbody radiation would be at that level, so you could keep electrodes much cooler, say around 1100 K. If I have done the calculations right—and I invite you to do them yourselves–neither conduction nor convection with any reasonable internal gas velocities can cool the gas anywhere near as fast as radiation, so they can be ignored. In addition the entire heat content of the 0.7 g of gas in the chamber is only 8 or 9 kJ so if you cool it all the way down to the electrode temperature in 5 ms, you still only get 1.5 kW/cm^2 for a 10 cm radius spherical vacuum chamber.
However, if the droplets of molten boron hit the electrodes and stick, they would presumably freeze on to it and probably cause localized melting. So clearly it would be really good to keep them away or prevent them from sticking. The question is how can we calculate that?
Now obviously we can’t be pumping boron mist through a pump so I am not talking about evacuating the chamber in a generator. I suspect there should be some good way of letting the helium produced slowly leak out and new fuel leak in.
The pumping-out idea is for the experiment, when we would be pumping out cooled boron dust. No doubt that would not be good for the roughing pump, (the turbo would be turned on later) but we are talking about thousands of shots, not billions.
I have not looked up boron-beryllium chemistry as yet. Does anyone know about that? My guess is that, again, very few compounds are stable at these temperatures.