Reply To: Military Effects

[asymmetric_implosion]

Brian: Pun on the name is cute. But the humor aside, I know the technology exists because I have worked with it for the last five years. I have a few peer reviewed publications in the area of plasma focus devices and how to build their pulse power systems that I’ve listed below. Brian, too, by the way.

Brian L. Bures, Mahadevan Krishnan, Robert E. Madden, and Florian Blobner, “Enhancing Neutron Emission from a 500J Plasma Focus by Altering the Anode Geometry and Gas Composition” IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci. Vol 39 No 4 pp 667-671 (2010)
B. L. Bures, C. James, M. Krishnan and R. Adler “Application of an impedance matching transformer to a plasma focus” Rev. Sci. Instrum. 82, 103506 (2011); doi:10.1063/1.3648117
Brian L. Bures, Mahadevan Krishnan and Robert E. Madden “Relationship between Neutron Yield and Macro-scale Pinch Dynamics of a 1.4 kJ Plasma Focus over Hundreds of Pulses” IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci. Vol. 39 No 12 pp 3351-3357 (2011) doi: 10.1109/TPS.2011.2170588
Brian L. Bures, Mahadevan Krishnan and Colt James “A Plasma Focus Electronic Neutron Generator” IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci. Vol 40 No 4 pp 1082-1088 (2012)
Brian L. Bures and Mahadevan Krishnan “An alternative scaling relationship for neutron production in Z-pinch devices” Physics of Plasmas Vol 19 No 11 112702 (2012)

I’m not a novice talking without some background. I’ve been in the trenches with PF devices making them work. If you have a specific complaint about my disingenuous comments related to switch choice or vacuum technology I’d be happy to talk about it. That is what the forum is about.

There is a huge difference in funding levels. No one denies that. One selling point of the PF is that it is an easier, faster, cheaper path to fusion. Many millions have been spent on PF device develop and it is far behind the tokamek right now in terms of Q. It could be made up if the device begins to work correctly. That is the part I find frustrating. The tantalizing data that is out there needs some backbone to it and a working device could provide that data. Time will tell. The PF has enjoyed application based funding for some years that can viewed as tech base development for FoFu-1. The Z-pinch community has already addressed many of the pulse power problems as they operated at much high voltages (1-6MV) and currents (1-20 MA) routinely with rise times of less than 200 ns while FoFu-1 operates with >1 us rise times with 1-3MA of current at 35-45 kV. Even with this tech base I’m sure that the PF program is poorly funded by comparison to the tokamek program. I think one could find passionate advocates in the plasma and fusion community if the proof of concept experiments were completed successfully. Use existing tech to prove the physics works and then push for the state of the art tech to make it pretty. This has been the approach of many successful science programs turned into useful things like commercial products.

The politics of fusion are really opinions so I can agree to disagree. Time will provide the answers.