[BSFusion]

The attached file comes from a wikipedia article on gamma radiation.
I don’t have permision to post it here, so please delete it if necessary.

Attached files

[BSFusion]

And Bubble-confined Sonoluminescent-laser Fusion (BSF) certainly doesn’t have any issues, since it only exists on paper. Not enough research on a practical device has been done to even confirm how thick this blanket might be since the laser would have to traverse it too. Nor do we know the energy level and penetration power of these neutrons leaving the bubble reaction. Too slow or too fast, and they won’t interact with the heavy water (deuterium) to make Tritium. Nobody has even confirmed real fusion reactions taking place. So far, some of the scientists working on it, have resigned that the temperatures needed for fusion could not be reached using bubbles.

BSF is still quite hypothetical.

Jo…, In BSF, external lasers do not have to transverse the blanket, the coolant material of the blanket resides inside of a spherical laser cavity, and, after that material is pumped into a state of population inversion, it functions as gain medium, just like in any other liquid laser. In the context of BSF, two coolant mixtures were examined, Li2BeF4 and a randomly chosen glass mixture having the formula (SiO2)50(PbO)10(Li2O)30(Nd2O3). The mean free path distances for 14 MeV fusion neutrons, traveling at approximately 15 meters per microsecond, were calculated to be, 7.14 cm and 5.95 cm, respectively. I think you are still confusing BSF with sonofusion; BSF does not use deuterium in heavy water to produce tritium, it uses Li in molten glass (or FLiBe), and BSF uses a high energy laser to ignite the fuel, acoustics play an insignificant role – they are only used to pre-compress the fuel and trigger the initial laser cascade. What scientists are you talking about? I’m the only person working on BSF.

So, to be clear, would a pB11 FF reactor definitely need shielding to be around humans, or not?

For a p-11B FF reactor, in addition to neutrons, large quantities of hard X-rays will be produced by bremsstrahlung, and 4, 12, and 16 MeV gamma rays will be produced by the fusion reaction. Shielding from gamma rays requires large amounts of mass, in contrast to alpha particles which can be blocked by paper or skin, and beta particles which can be shielded by foil. Gamma rays are better absorbed by materials with high atomic numbers and high density, although neither effect is important compared to the total mass per area in the path of the gamma ray. For this reason, a lead shield is only modestly better (20-30% better) as a gamma shield, than an equal mass of another shielding material such as aluminium, concrete, water or soil; lead’s major advantage is not in lower weight, but rather its compactness due to its higher density. Protective clothing, goggles and respirators can protect from internal contact with or ingestion of alpha or beta particles, but provide no protection from gamma radiation from external sources.

[BSFusion]

Bubble-confined Sonoluminescent-laser Fusion (BSF) has no activation issues, because its fuel is emmersed within a thick blaket of coolant that safely converts neutrons into tritium.

[BSFusion]

Jo…,

If you are serious about this… you will need to fully read and understand the research that came before. And understand its shortcomings.

Some problems I see with acoustic inertial confinement fusion are:
1) cooling loses are prolonged, because energy accumulates slowly, at the speed of sound,
2) small bubbles quickly lose thermal energy, because of their high surface-area to volume ratio,
3) energy is wasted breaking molecular bonds, both in the liquid and in the fuel,
4) only a small fraction of the energy gets to the fuel, because, at the high pressures fusion requires, liquids become very compressible, storing energy like a spring.
Some problems I see with laser inertial confinement fusion are:
1) Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities that mix and cool the fuel,
2) incomplete burn-up, because of the extremely short containment time,
3) optical damage from neutrons, heat, and target debris,
4) the cost of targets prohibits commercialization,
5) first wall material activation issues
BSF is not afflicted by those problems, and, in addition, BSF is expected to have higher gains than ICF.

Patents are all good and well, if you have a unique process or apparatus to exactly what you already KNOW can be done. A Patent does NOT equal Scientific Discovery. You really have to discover a new insight into scientific principle here. Not just invent a machine. The patent will come later, after all the ground work and you get a peer reviewed confirmation that your basic idea is sound. So far, Bubble Fusion is not proven to be feasible. And you will need to write a good paper to propose the idea again.

The ground-work is complete, and it is accessable by anyone with a computer, hundreds of free online reports, from LLNL, LANL, SNL, PPPL, and other government & private labs. AFAIK, BSF stays within the boundaries of current scientific knowledge. Please explain any violations you have in mind, when you imply BSF does not use KNOWN scientific principles. Also, I’m pretty sure BSF is NOT ready to be written-up in a peer reviewed paper. First, I am not ready to do the writing. Second, I don’t want to look foolish if it doesn’t work. Afterall, I have no scientific training and I could easily have overlooked something. No, it is better to scrutinize it here first, then someone here can volunteer to do the write-up.

Thanks

[BSFusion]

Jo…,

Continuing where I left off with my last post… In BSF, when the amplified blackbody radiation returns, it must either be reflected or absorbed at the bubbles periphery, since it cannot penetrate beyond the critical depth, which for hot, dense DT is only a fraction of a millimeter. The laser’s heat and pressure quickly create a powerful shockwave, capable of ionizing everything in its path. Light cannot penetrate beyond the highly ionized leading edge of this shockwave, so the absorption sight for any subsequent laser energy would have to travel outward with the shockwave. Complicating the situation further, an explosive phase transformation is expected to occur in the coolant that surrounds the fuel. The reason for this is that the central focus-point of the reactor gets very hot and the rate of spontaneous nucleation increases exponentially with temperature. It is known that the frequency of spontaneous nucleation is about 0.1 s^-1 cm^-3 at the temperature near 0.89 Tc (critical temperature), but increases to 1021 s^-1 cm^-3 at 0.91 Tc. This indicates that a rapidly heated liquid could possess considerable stability with respect to spontaneous nucleation up to 0.89 Tc, with an avalanche-like onset of spontaneous nucleation of the entire high temperature liquid layer at about 0.91 Tc. Therefore, at a temperature of about 0.9 Tc, homogenous nucleation, or explosive phase transformation occurs. This idea of explosive phase transformation has been applied to the process of laser glass cutting, which uses a 10.6 m m wavelength CO2 laser since glass is opaque in the mid-infrared region of the spectrum. These lasers can deposit, through partial transmission and absorption, a large fraction (90%) of their energy.

LASERS, by A. Siegman, says:

“…If the amplification along a long thin cylinder of inverted atoms is sufficiently large, for example, this can produce an output beam from each end of the laser medium which can be quite bright, powerful, and moderately directional, with a fair amount of spatial (but usually not temporal) coherence. This radiation may become strong enough to produce significant saturation along the gain medium, and to extract the major portion of the inversion energy into the directional beams. The inverted medium thus acts as a “mirrorless laser,” with output characteristics that are intermediate between a truly coherent laser oscillator and a completely incoherent thermal source.”

BSF depends on amplified blackbody emission ABE, which is more intense and localized than amplified spontaneous emissions ASE. The ABE from a high-temperature sonoluminescent bubble will quickly reach saturation (see figure 18), unlike ASE. In addition, because a medium’s saturation fluence goes down (due to thermal line broadening) with increased temperature BSF’s hot laser medium will diminish the amplification of ASE relative to ABE.

Spherical phase coherency of the laser should not be a problem for BSF. The reason I say this is that, the size of a sonoluminescent bubble is large (~1 cm dia.) compared to the predominant laser wavelengths (~1.06 +/- 0.005 micron for Nd3+), so, even when two waves (located near the desired absorption point) are temporally or directionally out of phase, it is likely that they will constructively interfere within a short distance, and this, in turn, might cause electrons in the vicinity to absorb their energy. The absorption band of laser energy at the start of a BSF implosion is expected to be about 0.4 mm thick, mostly coolant at the outer perimeter of the bubble, which gets heated to a temperature of around 90 eV. At this temperature most of the elements in the coolant will be ionized to the 4th level, and it is the expansion of this highly ionized coolant that drives the bubbles compression. Most of the pressure used to compress the fuel comes from the extra particles (electrons), since, at a given temperature, all particles acquire the same kinetic energy. In addition, since the acoustical pressures in the vicinity of the bubble would be extremely high, and since there is no vacuum for the fuel to squirt out into, I see no reason why BSF targets could not be imploded non-symmetrically.

[0085] An observation worthy of attention, is the fact that, because of spherical geometry, a ray of light inside the sphere has its path confined, bouncing on a single plane that it cannot leave. That plane is determined by the ray’s origin, the first point of reflection, and the sphere’s center. A close examination reveals that if a ray of light passes close to the center it will return after two reflections, revisiting the same approximate location. This observation appears prominently in the simulation results (figure 11), which show an unexpectedly high two-reflection reabsorption rate. This (high two-reflection reabsorption rate) improves the sphere’s overall energy retention ability, allowing off-center target ignition. Also, since there is extra leeway to position the fuel, a less stringent control system is required.

[BSFusion]

Jo…, the links you posted are irrelevent. Prosperetti’s theory, pertaining to how stable single bubble sonoluminescence occurs, has been discredited; high speed cameras have recorded the phenomena and show that no liquid jets are present. In addition, BSF does not rely on stable oscilating bubbles, after one big acoustic squeeze, the fuel is laser-heated (~1,000,000 K) and then compressed using Andrei Sakharov’s notion of ionization compression.

“The high compression of a small bubble of fluid is similar to the explosive compression of a pellet of material by laser beams, one of the methods proposed for creating nuclear fusion, which has not been very successful. Prosperetti and others think that it is impossible for a bubble to maintain a perfectly spherical shape as it compresses, with either the laser or acoustic compression method, ruling out the high temperatures required for nuclear fusion.”

AFAIK, NIF scientists are still predicting ignition by 2013, and, contrary to predictions which claim a converging shock is always unstable, H. B. Chen of IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, in an article titled “The Rayleigh-Taylor and Imploding Shock Wave Instabilities in the Spherical Pinch”, found that the growth rate of perturbations was not exponential and that spherically imploding shock waves are relatively stable near the collapse phase of the shocks.

The initial stage of bubble collapse is slow and isothermal, during which the energy deposited in the bubble interior is readily transferred to the surrounding liquid via thermal conduction. As the speed of collapse increases the interior of the bubble undergoes compressional heating and becomes increasingly adiabatic due to the rapidity of the bubble collapse.

Sonoluminescence is now a well understood phenomena, unrelated to fusion. The spectrum of light emitted by a sonoluminescent bubble is extremely well fit to the spectrum of a blackbody. When a bubble is heated through adiabatic compression, the radiation of electrons (ie. a bremsstrahlung plasma) becomes thermally equilibrated in the opaque medium at the bubbles perimeter such that only the blackbody surface emission is observed for strongly driven bubbles.

In Journal of Fluid Mechanics 1998 “Analysis of Rayleigh-Plesset dynamics for sonoluminescing bubbles,” it was suggested that the ideal fluid for creating a violently collapsing but surface-stable bubble should have a low surface tension and a high viscosity… other suggestions capable of up-scaling the collapse intensity would be to use lower driving frequencies and/or larger ambient pressures at the same Pdriver / Pambient. BSF already incorporates several of these suggestions into its physical design, and its operational methods can incorporate the rest. In addition, because of the high ambient temperature inside of a BSF reactor, higher post-compression temperatures should be possible. Taken altogether, it should be easy to create a luminous burst of sufficient strength to trigger the necessary outgoing laser cascade.

Recent experiments conducted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign indicate temperatures of at least 20,000 K, in an oscillating bubble, but higher temperatures could be achieved, if the bubble was not required to be trapped and oscillating, by one powerful squeeze. In this method of Single Cavitation Bubble Luminescence (SCBL) the number of emitted photons per flash and the pulse duration are both much greater than in Single Bubble Sonoluminescence (SBSL). Another advantage of SCBL over SBSL is that SCBL bubbles can be about a thousand times bigger (radius = ~3 mm) and take a hundred times longer (~100 microseconds) to collapse. Under low driving pressure, the presence of a noble gas in the bubble was found to be crucial for producing stable high-intensity light emissions. Without the noble gas, there was a low temperature ceiling, of about 6000 K, most likely the result of molecular disassociation, H2 + energy -> 2H, inside the bubble. It takes energy to break bonds, and the noble gases have none. Under driving pressures from 1.9 to 3.1 bar, the observed emission temperature ranges from 6200 K to 9500 K. The temperature also increases if monatomic gasses are dissolved inside the bubble, such that higher temperatures are achieved by heavier Nobel gasses.

[BSFusion]

Joeviocoe, its good to be skeptical, but what you are doing is unfair – you are falsely associating BSF with Teleyarkhan, which robs BSF of its credibility before it has had a chance to be properly considered. Also, are you sure lasers were used to ignite the fuel in “Chain Reaction,” and not just for measuring the size of the bubbles? If you are correct, then “Chain Reaction” would qualify as prior art, invalidating my patent.

I’m not too concerned about my website; it was only created to allow easy access to BSF patent documents & diagrams, without requiring the installation of special software that would otherwise be necessary for gaining access through the USPTO. Sorry, the patent application is quite long (100+ pages), poorly written, and contain a lot of “word salad.” Some reasons for that are, time is limited when writing a patent, I have no English training beyond the 7th grade, and this is just a hobby.

Some frequent misconceptions about BSF:
a) the size of the bubbles used in BSF are larger (~1 cm diameter) than those used in a typical sonoluminescent experiment with oscillating bubbles, which, at maximum dilation, are not much larger than the width of a human hair.
b) BSF is not sonofusion. BSF uses an extremely high energy laser to ignite the fuel. It is true that the bubbles get heated and pre-compressed using acoustical pressure, but this is primarily to trigger a focused laser cascade, not to ignite the fuel.
c) The on-target energy dumping capacity of BSF’s laser is greater than NIF’s. There are two reasons for this. First, BSF’s laser contains a larger volume of amplification material. Second, BSF uses liquid amplifier material that can handle a higher flux than the solid-state optics of NIF, which might warp, fracture, melt, etc.
d) BSF is a new and untested approach to fusion. Currently, no single device incorporates all of the necessary parts, interconnected in one unit. But, all of BSF’s technology (ie. liquid lasers, acoustical transport, piezoelectric harvesting, etc.) has been verified separately in other devices.

[BSFusion]

Joeviocoe, I really hate being compared to Taleyarkhan.

Taleyarkhan did not invent BSF. In fact, his apparatus does not even use a laser. Check for yourself. I googled “BSF deeth” and got 60,100 results, but when I googled “BSF Taleyarkhan” I only got 28 results, and, in those few cases, the BSF stood for either Bible Scientific Foresight or BioSciences Federation, not Bubble-confined Sonoluminescent-laser Fusion. Also, don’t confuse BSF with tabletop tinker toys, its intended as a full-scale power plant.

I have no idea what you’re reffering to, when you mentioned an “original” website, where is that?

Anyway, I should have included the Title & Abstract (see below) with my original post, sorry.

TITLE OF INVENTION
==============
A NUCLEAR FUSION POWER PLANT HAVING A LIQUID REACTOR CORE OF MOLTEN GLASS THAT IS MADE LASERACTIVE AND FUNCTIONS AS A TRITIUM BREEDING BLANKET WHICH IS CAPABLE OF ACOUSTICLY COMPRESSING/CONFINING FUEL SO THAT IT RADIATES AND TRIGGERS OUTGOING LASER CASCADES THAT WILL REFLECT FROM THE BLAST CHAMBER’S SPHERICAL INSIDE WALL AND RETURN LIKE PHOTONIC TSUNAMIS, CRUSHING, HEATING, AND CAUSING THERMONUCLEAR IGNITION OF THE FUEL SO THAT HEAT ENGINES AND PIEZOELECTRIC HARVESTERS CAN CONVERT THE RELEASED ENERGY INTO ELECTRICITY.

ABSTRACT
=======
A nuclear fusion power plant having a spherical blast-chamber filled with a liquid coolant that breeds tritium, absorbs neutrons, and functions as both an acoustical and laser medium. Fuel bubbles up through the sphere’s base and is positioned using computer guided piezoelectric transducers that are located outside the blast-chamber. These generate phase-shifted standing-waves that tractor the bubble to the center. Once there, powerful acoustic compression waves are launched. Shortly before these reach the fuel, an intense burst of light is pumped into the sphere, making the liquid laser-active. When the shockwaves arrive, the fuel temperature skyrockets and it radiates brightly. This, photon-burst, seeds outgoing laser cascades that return, greatly amplified, from the sphere’s polished innards. Trapped within a reflecting sphere, squeezed on all sides by high-density matter, the fuel cannot cool or disassemble before thorough combustion. The blasts kinetic energy is absorbed piezoelectrically.

[BSFusion]

Its been two years, since this Comparison of Contenders has been proposed, has someone been updating the information?
I’de like to add another contender to the list, but before it gets consideration, I think it should be thouroughly scrutinized.
Please point out any potential flaws in the following approach to fusion (below). Thanks

====

Bubble-confined Sonoluminescent-laser Fusion (BSF), is one of the newest approaches to generating thermonuclear fusion power. It combines ideas from laser Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF), sonofusion, and peizoelectric energy harvesting. In respect to other approaches, BSF is expected to have the following benefits: a higher power generating capacity, more efficent energy conversion, a higher tritium breeding ratio, and no activation issues. In addition, BSF’s fuel targets are inexpensive, because they are fabrication-free (bubbles), and, being emersed directly in the coolant, the fuel cannot disperse as quickly as fuel in an ICF target that is situated inside of a vacuum chamber. This extended containment time leads to higher gains, because self-heating can begin at a lower ignition temperature and a larger fraction of the fuel can be burnt.

For more info see: http://home.centurytel.net/bubbles/bubbles.htm

[BSFusion]

Thanks for the comments. 🙂

Yes, you are correct, but that curve was neither intended to be extrapolated beyond its 0.2 – 10 keV temperature range, nor was it to be used for scientific insight – It was only designed to be a resonably accurate fit over a limitted range of experimental values. The goal, as I stipulated it in my original post, was to find an expression for that would allow easy mathematical manipulation, focusing primarily on ease of integration. If you want a scientific model, the Bosch-Hale formulation can be used, but B-H cannot easily be integrated, and it is so complex that writing it down on paper requires almost a page, and the calculation needs to be broken into three parts prior to performance.

Unfortunately, as vansig & asymmetric_implosion correctly pointed out, the formulation is based on a stable, thermal (Maxwellian) plasma, so applying it outside of those parameters is not appropriate.

[Author]

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