unity countdown clock

[vansig]

As of today, 20 April 2010, how many orders of magnitude short of unity can we say FoFu-1 is?

[KeithPickering]

vansig wrote: As of today, 20 April 2010, how many orders of magnitude short of unity can we say FoFu-1 is?

As near as I can tell, it’s impossible to say from data available on this site. About all we know that good shots produce .5 KJ in the electron beam and 1 KJ in the plasmoid. But that’s not much energy in the first place, and we have no idea how much energy is used to create a shot.

Perhaps someone else has seen something I’m missing somewhere.

[Rezwan]

Great idea. Unity countdown clock! Are these set up for other fusion projects? It would be good to set them up for a few.

I agree with Keith, though. Difficult to say where you are.

Still, such a clock would a good conceptual device to talk about fusion goals, if not to measure actual progress.

Now to get the unity countdown clock app for my iPhone.

[Breakable]

Phone apps can be arranged as long as we have some estimates available

[Rezwan]

OK as a baseline, start off with tokamak or iter project estimates. Are those estimates public?

[vansig]

there was a comparison chart, somewhere, showing different fusion approaches and the race toward unity, that i believe also made it into Eric’s google tech-talks video, wherein he said that it’s unknown who will get there first, but at this time focus fusion has a bit of an edge.

with .5 kJ in the electrons, and 1 kJ in the plasmoid, that’s 1.5 kJ; if i recall, someone said that this has to come up to 100 kJ to reach unity. but it doesnt really make sense to say that the clock is at 1.8 orders of magnitude, (does it?) since useful energy isnt coming off, yet.

we know the Rogowski coil isnt ready, and there’s no onion, and the fuel in there, currently, is deuterium, and the anode shape and magnetic field, and pulse have yet to be optimized, and that the device will reach thermal unity before it reaches electrical unity.

but we also know that there are fusion reactions occurring. what’s the yield?

is it optimistic of me to say the clock is at 2.5 orders of magnitude?
should i say 5, instead?

[jamesr]

vansig wrote:
with .5 kJ in the electrons, and 1 kJ in the plasmoid, that’s 1.5 kJ;

The is total is 1kJ not 1.5kJ: The 0.5kJ in the electrons was estimated, as I understand, from the erosion from the electron beam on the anode. This means the ion beam also has 0.5kJ giving a total in the plasmoid of 1kJ before it collapsed and emitted the two beams. From the peak current they can tell how much energy was stored in the magnetic field, and so find the proportion that was focused into the plasmoid

The figure it needs to be compared against is the energy in the capacitors before the shot, which can be easily found from the voltage and capacitance Energy=0.5CV^2
I tried to see on the gallery pictures what the labels on the capacitors say they are but I can’t make it out.
But say they added up to 12uF, at 24kV charging voltage this gives 3.45kJ total. As they ramp up the charging voltage more energy will be able to be delivered into the pulse.

[Aeronaut]

I think DEMO’s currently scheduled to be producing electricity by 2050. Haven’t been to ITER’s site recently. And to my knowledge, nobody else is talking about their fuels. Hope I’m wrong about that, but until then, once we achieve goal #7, the FF bet gets a lot more secure.

Achieving goal #7- pB-11 fusion- sets the stage for the last march to the peak of this mountain. The deuterium-fueled experiments are required for calibration and machine shake-down, as well as verifying theory, but they equate to an army of porters moving a trainload of supplies up a mountain like Everest. Demonstrating pB-11 fusion will be like igniting the 3rd stage of a rocket, which may or may not go on to achieve orbit. So again, signs are good, but there’s no way to accurately predict, only report what did or didn’t happen at a given point in time.

To achieve goal #8, we need to demonstrate more joules out than joules in. Thermal and electrical unities are further milestones, if I understand this correctly.

General Atomics is one site manufacturing this type of cap. Their big boys top out around 10 or 12 uF and 100kV (with a design life multiplier curve that rewards lower applied voltages).

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