Energy production without the hot air.

[opensource]

Can you guys make a list of fusion power theories and practices (that is, reactors that have been tested, and ones that may work) that produce electricity without the conversion to and from heat first (like FF)? I’d like to learn more about the array of reactions we can produce with plasmas and their associated technologies and processes. For example, rocketry would be enhanced from creating a thrust producing reaction directly without care for energy conversion (unlike an electric motor converting electricity to propulsion with a propeller). Is there a formal name for what I’m describing? Hopefully your lists of theories and technologies will point me and others to the right tool for the job (be the job learning or actual engineering).

[Rezwan]

Great idea!

This is something to crowd source. We want something like this for our education materials (our “fusion knowledge map”), but compiling it is labor intensive.

A while ago I set up a wiki – https://focusfusion.org/index.php/wiki – feel free to start putting a rough sketch of what you want up there. Doesn’t hurt to start compiling the info! And we can use all the help we can get!

I am thinking of switching to “mediawiki” for this instead, so we can wikifarm and so that the protocol is more standardized with other major wikis (requiring less formatting and being more transferrable). This requires a bit of an upgrade on our server.

Our present wiki can also be upgraded to work with moveable type but seems more limited. Although it would be better integrated into this site. We need to make a decision soon. Website upgrade for crowd-sourcing of knowledge map is a top priority.

Suggestions?

[Rezwan]

Ah. Now looking back on it, I see the other reason I stalled. I became overambitious. The page for the multiple experiments is here: https://focusfusion.org/index.php/wiki/Catalog_of_Experiments/

Might not make sense to you, but it fits into this whole “dynamic information updated in real time” idea I had, where we’d feed project data in real time to each device –

Need to keep it simple : )

[Breakable]

“The page for the multiple experiments is here: https://focusfusion.org/index.php/wiki/Catalog_of_Experiments/” seems to be empty

[Rezwan]

Indeed it is!

That’s my point. Y’all can fill it! (Although my other point is that I’m thinking Media Wiki would be a better wiki to use for this purpose.)

We’re looking into hiring someone full time for that sort of research and content development. (Which means we’re looking for funding). We’re working on that, because it’s an important part of the mission. Education and outreach. In the mean time, and in any case, there needs to be a large crowd sourcing of this type of effort – to track down all the info. So the other thing we’re trying to set up is a better website to coordinate this all, a process to both streamline and expand; capture and clarify; improve the information signal.

FYI, I also set up the “Contenders” section for following fusion projects in general.

And we have an “Other aneutronic” section – but it would be nice if members were tracking down the info, sticking it in the wiki, and we could just use that section to connect people to the wiki – and also to then develop channels for each experiment to track news as it becomes public.

Backlog. Apologies. Understaffed : )

[Rezwan]

Which brings me back to the chorus: we need more members! This content ain’t gonna write itself. Members can do a lot of this work (once we set things up better to facilitate that) or can fund others doing the work; and bigger member numbers impresses foundations who may in turn fund us so we can hire people to do a lot of this work, to edit and facilitate the work of the crowd, to improve the platform to get the thing humming in a self-sustaining way.

[Breakable]

Definitelly, thank you for a clear explanation. Yes, we definitely need more of everything: more members, more participation, more activity, more news, etc…
About time we kick this revolution into overdrive:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w66FXy6UHS0

[opensource]

I’m not only talking about FF specific experiments, so maybe that page isn’t as appropriate of a discussion forum as this one.

I’m not sure of your web framework issues… Movable Type is okay if it is working for you… I’ve only used python frameworks myself. If you feel a bottleneck in “crowd sourcing,” compiling information on fusion and plasma physics related topics, then I think it is because both of these fields are growing (but are still fairly small in comparison to even closely related scientific fields – like neutronic fusion and projects involving a lot of EM stuff). Anyway, you’re doing a fine job with the web architecture (but feel free to hit me up for IT advice/help Rezwan).

Maybe we could get more professionals and professors to collaborate by posting. Though the web forum concept/behavior is a rather new one, so people that are old enough to be professors might do better replying using interviews, blogs, videos, and the like. I would be happy to start some dialogs – and I did to a small extent when I visited the Alfvén lab at KTH last summer. This needn’t be FF specific either, but like most things related to one another, it has the ability to greatly enrich our ability to work on DPF-related devices.

With supporting a small project comes the issues of having a small community. Learning more about physics and engineering, though, would certainly not be restricted to such a small group of contributors.

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