Reply To: Repowering the electric utility industry

[asymmetric_implosion]

Burning something up has a cost to it as well and redesigning has a cost as well. The cost of choosing bad switches are already well discussed on this board. I’m not suggesting significant time and money be spent on a massive redesign. I agree that at a few shots per day it isn’t worth addressing some problems. It was a suggestion from my experience operating a rep-rate PF that that anode erosion be addressed and the sources that I observed in my experiments.

Vansig: I already presented my solution a few posts back in this thread. The solution is derived from more than 250,000 shots fired on a single anode and the impact it has on the anode. We revised our design and fired another 100,000 shots to find more problems. We are on our third revision to address thermal management and e-beam management. To be honest, the e-beam problem isn’t the hard problem. The hard problem is figuring out if the anode temperature is an important parameter in optimizing the fusion yield of a pinch and if this temperature is useful/allowed for a given application. There is little to no data in published literature about this subject. It might be relevant to achieving Q>1 as we’ve observed increases in neutron output as temperature increased and then it declined after a peak temperature. The increase is 4-5X in some cases.