Reply To: minimal size device for focus fusion to work?
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zapkittyannodomini2 wrote: A 747 produces approximately 85,000 HP peak (Thrust doesn’t translate to HP linearly!)
Which is approximately 64MW, how big would a 64MW FF reactor be??
At 5 MWe per core that’d be 13 cores.
Each core needs a bank of capacitors or equivalents and a vacuum pump. When the onion is factored in the core needs a meter of shielding + onion to bring the radiation down below background levels… thus the “standard” default of a single core 5 MWe unit being 2 x 2 x 3 meters.
…. but would adjacent cores need that much shielding from each other? and couldn’t they share caps and pumps?
Thus there’s a slew of unanswered questions concerning how many cores can be fitted into one shielded area, one “unit”, without interfering with each other… or melting each other.
Some here in this forum have ventured concepts with dozens or even hundreds of cores arrayed together which, since each core is supposed to produce ~5 MWe at high voltage and ~7 MWt, would result in some [em]interesting[/em] issues to deal with 🙂
(… i won’t mention vansigs 1500 core concept… really, I won’t)
But while I usually play ultraconservative in my approximations here (really!) it would be silly to insist that each core must have all the cubic meters of volume associated with the “default” FF unit in all configurations for all applications… so I’d have no problem with a 2-core 10 MWe unit in a cylinder 2 meters wide and 5 meters long. It’d still be a conservative estimate.
In the following attachments you’ll find 13 cores in 13 units as cylinders, 12 cores in 6 units with one left over :), and the 6 units in the wings with the ground crew getting ready to install the 13th core into the fuselage.
In all these concepts the NASA turbo-electric distributed studies show that the FF units and superconducting electric fans weigh less than the standard turbofans [em]and fuel load[/em] that they would replace.
Instead of doing double-duty for lift and fuel tanks the wings do double duty for lift and air-cooled radiators… which works out well since most turbo-electruc designs have the fans close above and aft of the wing or wing-body.