Reply To: Investment risk

[Francisl]

asymmetric_implosion wrote: People have tried two PF’s facing each other on and off since the 1970’s. The tale is one of woe. It led to the design of the hypocycloidal pinch. Rather than two concentric cylinders, the hypocycloidal pinch uses three ring electrodes. The rings are stacked in a cathode-anode-cathode configuration. A plasma is generated by flashing an insulator, like a PF, at the larger diameter. The plasma runs toward the center like a Z-pinch but it turns the corner at the of the rings and implodes. The pinch lifetime was observed to last for 10-100X longer than any pinch device at similar densities (~1E19 /cc). As a general rule, a pinch can hang together longer if the density is lower. A single NASA tech report was written and the idea was abandoned. I don’t know why. I would post the report but it is huge. I’ve wanted to test this idea in more detail as the beam damage and x-ray deposition should be significantly reduced due to geometry. The key problem that I observe is the energy stored in the pulse power is much larger than a PF so the energy released per shot must be larger.

I think I found two of the articles that you are referring to: INVESTIGATION OF HIGH ENERGY RADIATION FROM A PLASMA FOCUS FINAL CONTRACTOR REPORT NASA Grant and DENSE PLASMA FOCUS PRODUCTION IN A HYPOCYCLOJDAL PINCH.

This led to an article about using the hypocycloidal pinch as a high power trigger switch: Studies of the Plasma Puff Triggering Mechanism of Inverse Pinch Switch. Would this be practical now which is nineteen years later?