Reply To: Iconography

[Axil]

Glenn Millam wrote: Will this be much better than the beryllium that has already been written about on the site in stopping anode erosion caused by x-rays? If so, this would be great, for safety sake as well, as beryllium isn’t exactly a nice material in powdered or aerosol form (assuming that some erosion will occur to any anode over time). In fact, it would make quite a bad waste product in the replacement of anodes.

This post is a design suggestion for a possible improvement to the focus fusion reactor. The erosion rate of the beryllium central electrode is a limiting factor in the availability of the reactor. The reactor design should minimize frequent electrode replacement. One way to slow that erosion in the central electrode is to configure it so that the walls of the central electrode forms a heat pipe using lithium to remove heat from the hot plasma generation section at the tip of the electrode to a cold heat sink at the rear of the reactor. Such a lithium heat pipe has the heat conductivity of 1000 times that of pure copper and can remove heat at a rate of 30 kilowatts per square centimeter. Since Lithium is the most x-ray transparent solid element, it will not interfere with the x ray dynamics of the reactor. This suggestion will also function for copper electrodes.

For heat pipe background see the following:

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

Also see

http://www.cheresources.com/htpipes.shtml

I hope this is the right thread for this post.