Reply To: reference to electric field propulsion?

[jamesr]

Salgado wrote: I am aware of the “cold fusion” claims. Very interesting stuff, as much as it is controversial.

My proposal was to have one part hot fuel (high speed protons) and one part cold fuel (solid crystalline boron).
If fusion yield is an issue, maybe the protons can be put in a circular path (like a circular accelerator), going round and round until it hits something (hopefully boron!).
Would the protons just scatter in the crystal lattice, eventually running out of the necessary energy for fusion?

You will get some fusion if the protons have enough energy for head on collisions to overcome the Coulomb repulsion barrier. Indeed this is the method Cockroft & Walton used to achieve the first fusion reactions in 1932 (they used deuterium ion beam electrostatically accelerated into a deuterated metal hydride target)

However this would be an incredibly small proportion, and the energy needed to accelerate the ion beam would be orders of magnitude higher than that released by the reaction.

The majority of small angle scatters will just deposit the energy of the protons in the crystal, ending up as heat. If the beam was intense enough to produce a significant level of fusion reactions the heat generated by all the ones that don’t fuse would instantly vaporise it and turn the target area into plasma anyway.