Reply To: YouTube Focus Fusion Video

[Aeronaut]

zapkitty wrote:

Inline dual-core designs double shielding size and weight, while unnecessarily shielding the cap bank. A tandem multi-core design does little to increase shielding size, yet keeps the caps and cores out where they’re fairly easy to replace during a service call. Reducing downtime is going to be a huge selling point, imo, figuring a quick swap on-site followed in the depot by a nearly complete tear-down to replace the electrodes.

Errr… nope… that was a block diagram, not a blueprint 🙂 The caps in my concept would be no more shielded than required. Actual shields would be in sections and removed as needed for DPF servicing.

As to placing two cores adjacent in the same shielded volume… how close can the cores be before interfering with each other via heat, EM fields, radiation etc ? How would your concept be laid out?

Not really sure about proximity calculations, my stronger suits are electronics and fabrication. If you design the cores as round cylinders they can be rapidly swapped similar to loading and unloading a torpedo tube. The shipping container is compact,stackable. and standardized. There’s a large pool of skilled techs. The cool down to background levels is slightly less than 13 hours- not sure what to expect for acceptable exposure limits or cool down times for maintenance pros and what types of protective gear could possibly decrease cool-down times, which would be the lion’s share of expensive downtime for periodic required servicing. As if we don’t have enough unknowns already :grrr:

The most cost-effective way I’ve found to build and shield a 320 or more core installation is to build a central water tank from 30′ by 4′ or wider plate steel cut for welding the core tubes, which would become a significant portion of the tank’s structure. Spacers from the tubes would help support the top deck which would be a great place to put communal machinery and cap banks. I think this can be done within 1 bank’s timing limitations and the entire system can make a serious bid for recycling a single priming pulse to greatly extend cap bank life.

What I really wanted in a recycling scheme was around 1,000 cores to optimize the timing, but as you can see, even 320 cores is going to have some serious cooling requirements. Rematog discussed the industry standard cooling tower if you’d like more details about cooling a centralized installation.