Reply To: Stay out of politics

[Brian H]

jamesr wrote:

Doesn’t make sense to me. The plasma must be maintained at a high temp to be useful, and that’s where the energy from the electron beam goes. Why would you want to drain power/heat from the plasma? Defeats the whole purpose.

Surely you can’t maintain the plasma at a high temperature. OK you want it to get very hot at the focus, but at the end of a pulse the small proportion of gas that was heated to a plasma is going to carry on bouncing round the chamber and heat up everything else. You need to keep the electrodes cool enough to keep their surface vapour pressure down so they can survive for a reasonable length of time, and the copper or beryllium vapour doesn’t poison the reaction.

I would suspect though that the heat extracted from the cooling mechanisms needed on the whole device will be low level thermal waste and not useful for generating any power. It could heat a few buildings or greenhouses though.

James
No, the whole plasma has to be kept quite hot; cooling the electrodes is a big engineering challenge, though.

But there will be waste heat from that, and maybe there’s a way to use it:

http://www.livescience.com/technology/070604_sound_electricity.html.

At any given temp, a particular resonance frequency is set up, which can be manipulated to extract power.