[Aeronaut]

I see you’ve done your homework, Ferret. I can tell you (or you can read my posts) to see that Eric’s got it figured just about to a T. Have you run the numbers of the FF rig? The anode diameter is about the minimum it can be cooled yet not distort under magnetic fields.

[Aeronaut]

Outstanding work, Zap! :coolsmile:

My last gig was unloading shipping containers, so I know precisely how short and heavily framed they are, lol. They also come in 53 foot lengths, btw. For my purposes, a 53 foot FF generator trailer beats a shipping container for domestic markets for many reasons:

1. The components will ship to a job site on a flatbed to make them easily accessible to the end user’s crane(s) for fixed installations.
2. Much less (and lighter gauge) steel is used in the package- the weight can go towards water for the cooling system in remote/ emergency response applications.
3. Traveling roadshow demonstrations. Creative types can have a lot of fun imagining how to deploy x number of these trucks to power their city or village for free for a day. Google did a similar type of promotion recently to pick the city where they’d install a wi-fi network.
4. The system designer isn’t limited by the tube steel frame required for stacking, so some or all of the sides can either fold out or extend like on an RV when the system’s running. Now your side clearances are much wider and access to plumbing and wiring skyrockets.

The shipping container is made to order for international markets, if they emerge. Personally, the only international markets I see for any of the early manufacturers are countries that need lots of help with clean water and drainage even before electricity. Pro-bono work, which is designed into my plan.

[Aeronaut]

Tulse wrote: I guess my question was more basic — what is it about higher pressures that makes a pinch harder to achieve?

And is it a big issue to run vacuum equipment? I would think that kind of tech is very well developed and close to off-the-shelf — am I incorrect? Does it add a lot of complexity to the gear?

More fuel gas (pressure) requires more air and spark, nearest I can translate it to our level. I used to work in a place with lots of vacuum pumps which evacuated test chambers that were roughly 1 cubic meter, maybe a little smaller, in a few seconds. These monsters are not small, light, cheap, or cool-running. While they are required, I question the need for them on every shot if the machine were running around 1 khz, preventing the gas from condensing.

[Aeronaut]

But we know where to mine unubtanium now! ;-P Don’t forget the follow-on project to make unobtainium industrially usable, btw.

[Aeronaut]

Rezwan wrote: ITER’s website keeps getting better.

ITER is a large-scale scientific experiment that aims to demonstrate that it is possible to produce commercial energy from fusion.

The Q in the formula on the right symbolizes the ratio of fusion power to input power. Q ≥ 10 represents the scientific goal of the ITER project: to deliver ten times the power it consumes. From 50 MW of input power, the ITER machine is designed to produce 500 MW of fusion power – the first of all fusion experiments to produce net energy.

During its operational lifetime, ITER will test key technologies necessary for the next step: the demonstration fusion power plant that will prove that it is possible to capture fusion energy for commercial use.

What are the odds?

“the ITER machine is designed to produce 500 MW of fusion power – the first of all fusion experiments to produce net energy.” >:-( We’d be dismissed as quacks if we made a statement like that for a number of reasons.

“During its operational lifetime, ITER will test key technologies necessary for the next step: the demonstration fusion power plant that will prove that it is possible to capture fusion energy for commercial use.” How long is the design life? Is this the full scale proof-of-concept machine? in charitable terms, I may interpret this as the assumptive (sales) close. Your entire quote seems to preclude any meaningful challenges to their theory. This is called also called Framing, which can be a very subtly effective sales gambit.

I’d say the odds of them getting continued government support is very good, given the inherent SEO support that government-funded science receives by default, coupled with the lack of precision in goals, budgets, and deadlines. Someday never comes.

[Aeronaut]

jamesr wrote: They quote a plasma beta (the ratio of pressure over magnetic pressure) as >7 which is very good, and is a measure of how strong (ie big & expensive) a magnet you need to confine the plasma. This compares to 0.02 for some tokamaks & upto 0.5 for spherical tokamaks respectively. This is encouraging as you can confine the plasma at a much higher density in a cheaper machine.

Also, although the temperature they achieve is only 0.5keV, the electron temperature is 1/4.5 of the ion temperature, which is also promising.

After the two ‘smoke rings’ or compact toroids (CT) in their language, are fired at each other they form a ~1m wide blob of plasma with a peak density of 10^20/m^3 after around 40us, which is kept stable for around 1ms before instabilities set in, and the confinement is lost.

They say further heating mechanisms could be added such as neutral beam injectors (NBI), but I’m not sure this would maintain the favourable ion/electron temperature ratio needed for pB11 fusion

So that’s a pulsed design, also? If successful, will the blob be able to generate aneutronic fusion products for the entire ~mS of stable confinement?

[Aeronaut]

good catch, Zap. I’d keyed on the picture without reading the description. Unlike a generator, FF scales output by varying the pulse frequency. This means the cooling system is most likely to physically scale with output. The neat thing about semi-trailers is the ground clearance is over a meter, and they have lots of surface area to spread radiators over.

A variation of this topic might be how inherently road-worthy is a design? Iow, do we need an over-width permit? A house-moving permit? Special routes to avoid bridges? How does this work on flatbed railroad cars, etc.

[Aeronaut]

Tulse wrote: Why doesn’t the pinch occur at higher pressure?

It can, but has to be offset by higher capacitor bank voltage and the resulting increased current and magnetic fields crushing the plasmoid. At this point LPP’s nailing down the parameters which are relatively easy to repeat from shot to shot. Later on, these settings can speed up scientific confirmation in other labs.

Achieving reliable 3MA currents may be a short to mid-term set of engineering challenges.

[Aeronaut]

And from their rentals section springs a picture of at least one container ready to roll: http://www.generatorsurplus.com/generator_rentals.html

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:
Inertial fusion necessarily involves implosion of individual ‘pills’ of material, doesn’t it? The only suggested mechanisms I’ve seen for repetitive, controlled implosions seem to depend on unheard-of levels of mechanical precision and durability. That seems to me to introduce exponentially increasing opportunities for breakdown and the need for unobtainium.

From a machine-builder’s perspective, attempting to improve mechanical precision anywhere near that far is worthy scientific investigation in it’s own right. Now throw in the power and control systems, and NIF starts looking a lot less like a political patronage (machine politics) and laser weapons project.

[Aeronaut]

The term “maquiladora” (hope I spelled that right, it’s pronounced ma-key-a- dora), loosely translated, means “right across the river, where the labor and environmental laws are far more favorable”. :shut:

[Aeronaut]

Glad to see them publishing something, anything. Am I correct in understanding that they’re perfecting their containment fields?

[Aeronaut]

I think the number of jobs, contractors, and years speaks volumes about NIF’s continuing contributions. They’re into laser research; ITER’s into materials and cryo-electromagnet research, and all of this is amplified through the university systems. My opinion is that we remain open to collaboration should they initiate it. Not that I’m holding my breath…

[Aeronaut]

emmetb wrote:

What’s up with the badinage (cussing), and why is this under social marketing?

It should be under “contenders” or “weird science.” I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and put it under contenders for now.

I was mainly interested in the fact that they seem to have no problem to keep emiting shares. Note they already emited for about half a million dollars which funded their initial experiments during the 1980s. Also, it seems there is no problem for a private person to invest in them.
Investing in LPP and or FFS is governed by US investment law. Apparently your outfit isn’t.

[Aeronaut]

I don’t know about the theory- didn’t read every word on the page. We’ve discussed ball lightning fusion here somewhere, and I’ve seen this idea look better, more credible, every year. The page looks credible and the proposed plant looks large enough to get serious investor attention. Now, about Dutch investment law, I’m clueless.

[Author]

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