More news, please

[Rezwan]

Aeronaut wrote: I’m thinking more along the lines of a new years’ blurb saying something like “The primer paint is dried, now we’re beginning the top coat”.

I was at the ICC workshop and got to listen to Michel LaBerge’s presentation of General Fusion. He showed a movie – I have just sent him an email to get a link to it. Great stuff.

Of relevance to this disparaging remark: Laberge’s video includes a tour of their facilities, starting with the front offices and moving through the lab and to the back offices where the engineers sit. The front door opens on this SCREAMING green room. And he remarks that they wanted to show they’re a “green” company – and that the color didn’t look so extreme on the little card. I found that very amusing because we had a somewhat heated debate about covering the entire lab with screaming green paint. We ended up with a few accent walls in yellow and the rest the standard white. Thank goodness.

[Rezwan]

Breakable wrote: I guess you would have to get membership to receive such information on short notice, otherwise the membership itself would not make sense.

Intriguing statement.

[Rezwan]

jamesr wrote: Although this site has close ties with LLP it should not be thought of as a fly on the was of a research lab.

For any quality scientific research, whether by a private company or academic institution, I believe it is right and proper for any substantive developments to be first published at a recognized conference or peer reviewed journal.

While it is interesting to debate and inform a wider community of the science and technology behind focus fusion through this society and its forums. In particular because there are contributors such as Eric himself to enlighten and correct comments made on aspects of the theory and design. We should not expect shot by shot updates of LLP’s ongoing research.

Exactly.

[Rezwan]

Aeronaut wrote:

FYI, The onion design has been temporarily shelved. The current thinking is that it will be more difficult to manufacture than a simple cylinder shape. Look at the picture Rez’ has posted on the topic titled “Dense Plasma Focus (DPF)” on the home page. It’s a small picture but it depicts a cylinder design. Perhaps later generations of the device can have an onion design, which may well prove to be lighter and more efficient.

Meanwhile, maybe we can harass Rezwan into posting a bigger picture of this variant.

My impression was that it was called an onion because of all those layers…

The onion design – Eric has explained this to me a couple of times. Someone else may be better able to turn this into an article. If you recall, we had an earlier animation that showed a cylinder. This was replaced with the electrode animation. This article posted by Rajdeep Singh Rawat on the DPF website gives some of the science behind the benefits of the “birdcage” electrode design over the solid cylinder. Now to just get something about the science behind the “onion”.

[Rezwan]

Rezwan wrote:

I guess you would have to get membership to receive such information on short notice, otherwise the membership itself would not make sense.

Intriguing statement.

So you’re looking at this like a service. You pay money for some news.

I would say that membership is about being a part of something, an organization, that does something you want done. A nonprofit organization with a mission.

I’m getting the sense that people have both unrealistic ideas about the time and money for research to get done, as well as for nonprofit organizations to function. How to put it in hard cold numbers.

Take a look at the website: http://www.dosomething.org – and then take a look at their 990 form. Every nonprofit has to file a 990, this is public information. Fascinating reading. This organization basically leverages their website to link teenagers to action they can take to make the world a better place. They also offer funds to teen initiated projects. Of note, right there on the first page is their 39 employees. In their expenses, $995,776 goes to salaries for those employees. $1,197,006 goes to fundraising expenses. And their website design was $149,641.

I admire their site and their approach, so I looked at their 990 to see what it took. Very enlightening.

Also, I had to fill out our 990s, so I wanted to see what was involved. Of course, I just had to fill out the ez version, 990N – because our organization has averaged less (far less) than 25K in the past 3 years. If you look at membership donations, it was about $4000 this year. That might pay for office supplies for the above organization.

The ~4000 in membership fees for FFS is from about 50 paying members.

Think about these numbers. All those folks who fear for global warming and believe in solar and wind and so forth put their concerns to funding the nonprofits that advocate for these things and volunteering for programs that the funded nonprofits then support. For fun, look up their 990 records. You’ll see how much money is involved, how much is “operation expenses” (salaries, accounting, website etc), and how much is “program”. These things don’t happen by themselves.

So, I’m trying to raise money to hire people to raise more money and to get the stuff done. It’s like any energy thing. You spend a lot of energy just to get the organization working, and the programs are the “net energy” – the surplus. The better your organization, the more the surplus/benefit/efficiency/output.

Sounds like what you’re interested in is a blog by Eric and fellow researchers. Something they’re not interested in doing.

[Aeronaut]

Intriguing numbers. I’d never heard of a 990, but I’ve always marveled at how small of a percentage actually makes it to an organization’s mission in the cases of most organizations with successful fund-raising programs.

I do have a question about when serial experimentation is more beneficial than parallel experiments where all teams can see what’s worked and refine experiments from there. Onion yield and manufacturing are going to be significant engineering and marketing challenges for as long as DPF fusion is in service since the fueling and cooling systems are going to be intertwined with the onion. So I’d expect the FFS program to look like it had gone dark during large stretches of the engineering phase.

I bought a press release (they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse) that will raise public awareness as well as deliver some link juice to FFS and LPP (anchor texts are aneutronic fusion and dense plasma focus). Look for stories based on it Monday and Tuesday, maybe for a long time if it taps the perfect storm that I believe is in place.

In less than 600 words I systematically reduced the capital costs of all nuclear (and turbine) programs to arrive at the DPF. Then it announces the target date of 2010 and the need to build a privately-funded network of FF-1 clones to solve a number of challenges that look more significant from the sidelines than they do from the field.

So anybody griping about lack of info could be more constructively using that effort to figure out how to finance either FF-1 or FF-2,501, which may “magically appear” at their community college within 2 years, unrestrained by govamint funding.

[JimmyT]

Rezwan wrote:

FYI, The onion design has been temporarily shelved. The current thinking is that it will be more difficult to manufacture than a simple cylinder shape. Look at the picture Rez’ has posted on the topic titled “Dense Plasma Focus (DPF)” on the home page. It’s a small picture but it depicts a cylinder design. Perhaps later generations of the device can have an onion design, which may well prove to be lighter and more efficient.

Meanwhile, maybe we can harass Rezwan into posting a bigger picture of this variant.

My impression was that it was called an onion because of all those layers…

The onion design – Eric has explained this to me a couple of times. Someone else may be better able to turn this into an article. If you recall, we had an earlier animation that showed a cylinder. This was replaced with the electrode animation. This article posted by Rajdeep Singh Rawat on the DPF website gives some of the science behind the benefits of the “birdcage” electrode design over the solid cylinder. Now to just get something about the science behind the “onion”.

Correct me if I’m wrong Aeronaut. But I think you and I are talking about the X-ray conversion part of the generator. Not the electrode portion, be it either cylinder or rods.

[Aeronaut]

Yep, Jimmy, we’re both talking about the X-ray converter’s thousands of layers being the onion.

[JimmyT]

Aeronaut wrote: Yep, Jimmy, we’re both talking about the X-ray converter’s thousands of layers being the onion.

Thought so. I just think it’s called the onion due to its “bulb” shape. You think it’s because of the layers. We may well both be right.

[Phil’s Dad]

“Layers Donkey, Ogres have layers” (Shrek 1) ;-P

[Aeronaut]

Phil’s Dad wrote: “Layers Donkey, Ogres have layers” (Shrek 1) ;-P

Precisco, Francisco 😆

[Brian H]

Aeronaut wrote:

“Layers Donkey, Ogres have layers” (Shrek 1) ;-P

Precisco, Francisco 😆
So do henhouses. So the onion is perhaps an egg? :-/

[mchargue]

Well, not so much from the forums, but here is some ready news about LP and DPF,

—–
At the beginning of March, good shots (those without pre-firing and with pinches) were a bit under 50% of the shots we fired. Since mid-month, we have increased that to 90% good shots. The two time-of-flight neutron detectors have produced more evidence that we are already duplicating the high ion energies achieved with higher currents in the Texas experiments. In our best shots, ion energies were measured in the range of 40-60 keV (the equivalent of 0.4-0.6 billion degrees K).
—–
More on,

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/04/dense-plasma-physics-update-great-month.html

[Aeronaut]

Great reading. Thanx for the tip, machargue 🙂

[Brian H]

Yes, excellent stuff! Actually, it’s on the LPP site, too.

Interesting excerpt:
“The electron beam carried about 0.5 kJ of energy and the plasmoid held about 1 kJ of energy, nearly half that stored in the magnetic field of the device. So, this is evidence that a substantial part of the total energy available is being concentrated in the plasmoids and transferred to the beams.”
The electron (beta) beam is not the one to be exploited to extract energy, of course; it’s the alpha (helium) beam, which is not mentioned. I’ve been wondering how that beam is being handled in this experimental rig. It seems not to be used or measured in any way as far as I can tell.

[Author]

Posts