[Aeronaut]

Henning wrote: An “Open Science” group is being founded in Chicago:
http://chiopensci.wordpress.com/about/

By someone who is building a scanning tunneling microscope:
http://www.chemhacker.com/

As focus fusion is somewhat of an open science project, this might be a good place for interested people living in and around Chicago to turn to.

It is still in its founding phase though.

We can learn from their approach, starting with a clean looking page that qualifies people by sub-interest. This ties in with what Emmetb posted about building the FF brand and using AdSense for monetization. But since Chicago’s only about a 5 hr drive from here in West Michigan, I’m kind of wondering about how global their thinking is at the moment.

[Aeronaut]

vansig wrote:

anyone have a clue yet as to what the raw output voltages might look like?

… still assuming that the net power comes from the onion…

both onion and ion exit beam could yield raw voltages from 50 kV to 2 MV depending on actual circuit design

Outstanding! Several standard US transmission voltages are in that range!

[Aeronaut]

“The Box” is simply an unidentified and therefore unchallenged hidden assumption. Think beyond 1 and you’ll find another. And another, and so on. Think outside several and you may see a pattern or few that lend themselves to economies of scale and an elegant process design.

[Aeronaut]

Tulse wrote: So could we get away with, what, two shipping containers for a fully self-contained DPF installation? Or would the cooling and transformers require more space than that?

Some cherry-picked applications could have very small apparent cooling and or transformer requirements. For instance, a FF used to heat a building could appear to have no cooling system beyond some tubing and pumps that are required to begin with. This is elegant design and engineering.

Designing the output waveform conditioning circuits for a nearby regional or national transmission line could shrink the apparent size of the output transformers.

I’m beginning to wonder about a small freighter or large trawler integrating a FF or few with a mobile desalination plant. Throw in some emergency comms and disaster relief agencies might become prospects.

[Aeronaut]

Brian, sorry, I’d forgotten the secuities interpretation of the word white knight. 😛

Remember how to troubleshoot a dead CRT-type TV set? (Fix the HV power supply to make any remaining problem(s) more detectable). If energy unity is proven in 2012 or even later in 2011, we’d darn sure better have at least one ace in the hole.

And I’m sticking to my guns about not looking to the big boys for help. Since we have no way to predict the future, we have nothing to lose by growing our own resources. Or do we?

[Aeronaut]

Rezwan wrote:

Also, a related question might be what LPP would look like if it was trying to do sales of the focus fusion as an energy generation device . . . or to do sales of licenses for other companies to build and sell the devices-

Aeronaut has been taking this approach, but I’m uncomfortable with it. One thing at a time. Proof of concept first. Should Phase I proof-of-concept deliver a verdict of feasibility, there will be plenty of time in phase II (developing a working reactor prototype) to come up with licensing models.

I see the hidden assumption that an existing, well-known company is going to be FF’s white knight, and am moving to remove our sole reliance on that class of the population and economy. A realistic onioneering program in my opinion must be crowd-sourced to a large number of privately owned and operated schools/research centers to simultaneously explore some paths while incrementally exploring other paths as the organization’s confidence level improves- which will be a non-linear curve iiuc.

Call it my manufacturing background or what have you, I believe that a credible onioneering program is going to require custom designed and built automated tooling, which nobody else’s numbers and schedules seem to reflect unless the machine tools are designed and built in parallel with the major research phases, and all of that is done in-house. Mine- and anybody I can scare into trying to beat me to execution.

Rezwan’s triple bottom line concept made a big impression on me. By building my internet-based company in phase 1, it can grow as big as it needs to be as fast as it needs to grow in order to fully exploit the first-mover advantage. Should FF work out. Phase 2 is building the school/lab network- gaining practical experience building 10,000 or more DPFs.

Phase 3 is all of the “paperwork” required to mass market the Aquarius line. Between the lines here is finding a production-oriented way to build cryogenic electromagnets.

[Aeronaut]

Also the fueling and safety systems.

[Aeronaut]

Yep, big magnets cost big bucks (but boy are the images impressive!). I almost voted 3, but went with 4. We’re the only transparent horse in the race, have the lowest ongoing and incremental budgets, and if successful, will produce the lowest priced machines on the market. No reason to change that now, that I can see.

Something to keep in mind is that the programs getting the big bucks for as yet unproven technologies (both fusion and fission) have in-person salespeople and very likely have a sales department budget at least the size of our total operating budget.

[Aeronaut]

Allan Brewer wrote: Whilst the current experimental setup definitely needs switches, might it be possible for the final production version to run without switches i.e. continuously and contiguously cycling, so that as one plasmoid detaches, a new discharge starts the axial phase of the following plasmoid?? That would need more parallel capacitors so that the first cycle doesn’t deplete the capacitors, and would result in a faster cycling rate than presently envisaged??

We’ll probably always need caps and switches to fire the first shot in a resonant circuit that could eliminate the question of the cap bank’s rated life at any given voltage. How to do that with only one or a handful of FF cores and cap banks will have a lot to do with who leads the initial manufacturing market due to elegant system design producing the reliability and price points required at any point in the adoption timeframe.

[Aeronaut]

Allan Brewer wrote:

…

Its still correct however that assuming the expected 10-20% inefficiency there would be 4-8MWatts of heat to remove from the system – which is challenging – its just that the heat is not arising from electrode resistance.

I’m curious what inefficiencies you envisage. Heat is directly generated in the plasmoid, and some losses would be expected in the ‘onion’. What others do you see?

Well that’s really the question I have been asking during this thread. I started with Rezwan’s posting https://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/how_will_we_get_there_from_here/ which not unreasonably expects unspecified inefficiencies of that order. I suspect you are right that the 70KJoules of energy to form the plasmoid will not all come out with the fusion energy into the Rogowski coil, and the onion will be less than completely efficient capturing the X-rays’ energy.

A true schematic will show the DPF on one parallel branch and it’s imaginary capacitance on the other. Iirc, this can easily account for 30% of the energy leaving the cap bank.
This leads me to wonder how challenging it might be to make a FF oscillate like a tuned circuit?

[Aeronaut]

Breakable wrote: I expect lots of mixing and matching from all the fusion concepts in all the design areas when we are further down the road:
confinement, thermal management, radiation management, bremsstrahlung control, fuels, switches, capacitors …

Me, too.

[Aeronaut]

If brought into the FFX voltage and or current ranges, it could greatly reduce the number of switches needed. The millions of cycles is sounding a lot better than what’s available today, but billions, or even trillions of cycles- or a cap bank that’s cheap enough to “throw away” (recycle into less-demanding uses) at least once a year is going to make DPF-based fusion generators a LOT easier to sell, imo.

[Aeronaut]

I can relate, Brian. I had to systematically explore every nook and cranny of the nav bar after the site was re-organized. I recommend that to everybody- there’s a lot of material on this site, and the search function on this and other PHP sites does seem to have blind spots.

[Aeronaut]

I’m looking forward to seeing the new site.

[Aeronaut]

Patientman wrote:

Thanx, PM. Looks like next year’s round for me and most of those. Time to get a passport, apparently!

I don’t think you need a passport to go to Minnesota from Wisconsin. :-))

I hope that this all works out and works well.

Thanx, PM. I can start practicing by making presentations on various challenges which FF unity could address to the local service clubs such as the Lions, Rotory Clubs, etc.

[Author]

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