[Henning]

Hi guys,

Shift your market focus away from Northern America, even if you’re eager to have your own FF reactors in your backyards. By my opinion, besides of universities (first adaptors for research) and heavy industries, the initial bulk of installed FF units will be located in China and other fast pace developing countries where regulations are less and demand is increasing enormously.

The US and especially the European countries will have a slower adaption rate because of their regulations, which is not a too bad thing anyway.

So, don’t worry to much. 😉

[Henning]

Ok, I kind of gotten it. Turbines go with steam of much higher temperatures as it is an widespread and tested technique. I’m just worried about the pressure the photovoltaic elements have to withstand, as they are just layers of foils which have to maintain vacuum on one side whilst running high pressures through them. Maybe do the plumbing with beryllium?

[Henning]

I’m actually wondering why gaseous substances are used as they have a bad thermal conductivity (or actually heat capacity) per volume. I see that Hydrogen and Helium are advantageous because of their low Z (protons) so they don’t absorb the x-rays as the cooling cycles have to run through the photovoltaic layers. But maybe the cooling of the outer layers should be done by a liquid beryllium-hydrogen or boron-hydrogen compound to get more heat transferred. Or are they too corrosive? Maybe resort then to liquid carbon-hydrogen.

[Henning]

Jolly Roger wrote: I am buying an RV soon, and I would love to have appliances that run on AC or DC. If manufacturers made all appliances dual function, it would provide incentive to change the infrastructure to DC.

“Built it, and they will come!”

Appliances with dual input of 12V DC and 230V AC are available for decades. At least here in Germany. And they are actually used in RVs and homes with photovoltaic arrays.

[Henning]

Sounds pretty much like Randell L. Mills’s Blacklight Power: http://www.blacklightpower.com/

[Henning]

I’ve gathered some ideas fitting the application form. Some revision is needed before submission (which should be finally done by Eric), but it’s a starting point.

8. Your idea’s name (maximum 50 characters):
Focus Fusion

9. Please select a category that best describes your idea.
Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?

10. What one sentence best describes your idea? (maximum 150 characters)
A cheap fusion device (USD 300000 per 10 MW unit in mass-production) converting alpha-particles and x-rays to electricity directly.

11. Describe your idea in more depth. (maximum 300 words)
Using a device called Dense Plasma Focus (DPF) temperature of 2 billion °C has been reached at Texas A&M University, where for an optimal fusing of Boron-11 and Hydrogen-1, which yields alpha-particles (Helium-4) and x-rays, a temperature of 4 billion °C is required. This temperature should be within reach of today’s technology, using stronger capacitors and faster switches. A DPF accelerates plasma with the help of very high currents, and at the end the plasma “pinches” within a tiny spot, fusing the fuel. The fusion results in x-rays a directed beam of Helium-4 ions, which is used to directly induce electricity into a coil. The x-rays are converted by a photovoltaic shell surrounding the device. The whole procedure is pulsed, and is repeated about 1000 times per second. See also focusfusion.org and patent application US 2007/0201598 A1 (Lerner & Blake).

12. What problem or issue does your idea address? (maximum 150 words)
Energy production and pollution. Boron-11 is abundantly available, requiring a few kg per MW per year. The “exhaust” is Helium-4 with minimal contamination of other elements, some are radioactive but will decay back to background radiation within a day. The more than thousandfold more expensive ITER fusion project utilizes a much more difficult to handle fuel Tritium and Deuterium (Hydrogen-2 and Hydrogen-3).

13. If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how? (maximum 150 words)
Whole humanity because of broadly available energy sources and less pollution, especially greenhouse gasses.

14. What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground? (maximum 150 words)
Construction of a proof of concept device (costs < USD 1Mio).

15. Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it? (maximum 150 words)
Proof of energy net production, and with further funding availability of a 5 MW prototype generator (about USD 10Mio). Measuring the coil’s induction energy and x-ray energy, it should outperform the energy put in, leaving room for conversion losses of x-rays. Converting x-rays to electricity is actually easier than converting infrared or visible light, but not very well researched [Eric: please confirm].

Maybe a narrated version of Torulf’s DPF animation would fit better the 30 seconds video, including a mentioning of a unit’s price and the 2 billion degrees C reached. Remember it does not need to include all facts already mentioned in the textual part, because of its supplemental nature.

Please take a more detailed look at the idea’s description, as it is not complete (for example missing the magnetic field effect), or should be rewritten.

[Henning]

For non-Nature subscribers also available as PDF at:
http://pdfmenot.com/store_local/996c794f28d65c93d38d6cb60ff50d2f.pdf
or as Flash-Version:
http://pdfmenot.com/view/http://pdfmenot.com/store_local/996c794f28d65c93d38d6cb60ff50d2f.pdf

From afar the graphics look a bit like that “pinch”, albeit only calculated with a single particle.

[Henning]

The new processors Geforce GTX 280 and GTX 260 support double precision: NVIDIA CUDA Compute Unified Device Architecture Programming Guide (see Appendix A and B)

But isn’t single precision enough here? Errors are just quantum fluctations… :smirk:

[Henning]

Actually Alexander Mayer refers to possible application in fusion research two pages later on “The strong force”:

The foregoing discussion is not simply academic. It suggests the possibility of a new approach to the technological problem of producing usable energy by the process of nuclear fusion. It would appear that a very particular impact velocity (i.e., p-wavelength) of nuclear interactions might be calculated that would increase the probability of a fusion event by many orders of magnitude. If this is correct, a machine might be constructed which somehow controls the impact velocity between nucleon projectiles and their designated targets within a very narrow tolerance of the calculated optimum interaction wavelength.

And also some stuff about room temperature fusion (but I don’t buy into that).

If dense plasma focus is sufficiently controllable (not with conventional design, but with Aaron Blake’s and Eric Lerner’s coil around the DPF), this would give an additional boost.

Additionally he is writing a book which might be quite similiar to “Big Bang Never Happened” with the tilte “The Many Directions of Time”, attacking the conventional Big Bang cosmological model. See: “New Cosmology”

[Henning]

Obviously not correct. It links to an old copy of LPP’s website (and not authoritative after all). CMEF was not able to collect the required USD 600000, only a fraction was transferred. Please see http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?pr=Investors for the current investment status.

Ok, it gives focus fusion some publicity, but unfortunately with the wrong information.

Cheers,

Henning

[Henning]

There is actually a patent on it:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=eG0TAAAAEBAJ&dq=fusion+rostoker

And two articles on Science:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/278/5342/1419?ijkey=A.zNwOzIwyrKA
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/5375/307a

And a bit of a story:
http://clasnews.clas.ufl.edu/clasnotes/clasnotes/9801/monk.html

I have to read it though…

[Henning]

There is a company called Power Chips which claims being able to convert heat to energy by a so-called Avto Effect (see Avto Metals) – all owned by a cooperation called Borealis.

That Avto Effect is based on the fact, that an excited electron (heat) that hits a wall with gaps finer of its own wavelength must release its energy to exist (some quantum effects stuff). Please read the details on their web page.

The same should be possible with photons (they’ve got a Photon Power site, now a little bit defunct). X-ray photons would require much finer gaps, so x-rays would be still a challange.

[Author]

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