Reply To: Peak Oil from Truth Out

[asymmetric_implosion]

Plasma flow along the electrodes is described by a number of models. The most analytically tractable is the snow plow model. The models grow with complexity as detail is added. The most advanced models run on parallel computing systems taking hours to complete a full simulation. This models consider current, geometry, gas pressure and depending on the model, the fraction of the gas that is carried by the plasma. In a plasma focus, only a fraction of mass is actually carried by the plasma. All these models assume breakdown (plasma generation) is possible and meets certain criteria. Generating a plasma at 50 atmospheres is non trivial to say the least. There is a reason that plasmas are generated at low pressure.

The pressure is an important input in the electrode design. For a given set of electrodes and current, there is a unique optimum pressure. One can increase the current to increase the operating pressure but moving from 0.03 atm to 50 atm would require an increase in current from say 1 MA like FoFu-1 to 50 atm without changing the electrodes requires an increase in current by ~31X. To my knowledge, the peak current ever generated in a pulse power device is 26 MA at Sandia National Lab on the Z-machine. The down side is the Z-machine pulse will not work for a PF; it is 100 ns instead of the 1-2 microseconds more commonly used in a large plasma focus. Z stores 20 MJ to generate the pulse. For a PF you would need something like 10X the stored energy to produce a pulse that is 10X longer. If you want to extend the current pulse by 1000x, you need 10,000X the energy of Z or 200 GJ per shot. Power generation would need to be 3X more than the bank energy to be useful. A single shot that produces 600 GJ is not impossible but the system engineering is well beyond our abilities at this time. For perspective, the average power plant operates at 3 GJ per second thermal energy or roughly 1 GJ/s electrical. You could argue that you need to fire only once every 400 s to sustain this rate. The problem would be designing a system that could deal with such a peaked power generation cycle.