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

[gianfranco]

ELECTRODE COOLING. Electrode cooling could become much easier by reversing feed polarity to the Cell (assuming this is technically possible and allowed by the electrical connections of capacitor & switches).

With polarity reversal the Anode would be grounded and the troublesome alumina insulator would be eliminated. The Anode could be built from a solid cylindrical block of metal, flanged thru the top chamber wall to an external heat sink which could be convection cooled, air cooled or liquid cooled, according to technical convenience & engineering constraints.

The Cathode would become a “floating cathode”. The top wall of the chamber could be made with a thick circular plate of Teflon, for limited mechanical elasticity, covered by a plate of Alumina carrying as many “towers” as needed to hold as many cathode bars. The cathode bars would be made of thick tubing joined on top by the cathode joining ring, also made of tubing. On the ouside of the top wall we would have the electrical connections (negative) to each cathode tube. In addition half the cathode tubes would receive liquid coolant under pressure (non-toxic transformer oil). The coolant would reach the top cathode joining ring and tru it reach the other half of the cathode tubes which would then discharge the coolant back to the cooling system. Any convenient method could then be used to stabilize coolant temperature to the required value and perhaps obtain Energy Recovery.

For example a “solid” (no insulator) Beryllium Anode with a thermal length of 10 cm and with the tip at 1,100 °C (Berillium melting point 1287°C) will dissipate almost 5,5 kW if the cold end is kept at 10 °C. Thermal length measured from center length of Anode and cold end. A single hollow Berillium Cathode bar with a wall thickness of 3 mm and a thermal length of 10 cm, if cooled by a suitable flow of oil at 100°C could be easily be kept at 600°C while dissipating heat in excess of 10 kW.

BORON DUST PROBLEM. My proposal is to employ an injector and a getter. The injector will be served by a calibrated injector pump which will deliver a metered quantity of Boron powder to the injector. This arrangement limits the quantity of Boron into the Chamber. The getter is a simple metal ring fitted near the inner bottom of the chamber connected thru an insulator to a low power positive HV supply (30 kV is a good guess). At the beginning of a discharge cycle the injector will supply the limited quantity of Boron powder. At the end of the ignition cycle and during recovery (say at plus 20 uS) the HV PSU will switch on and the getter will easily capture both Boron dust at zero charge from the Anode and at negative (residual charge) from the cathode. It should not be difficult to automatically recover Boron dust after a convenient number of cycles, because extra Boron dust will be localized at the bottom of the chamber.