[JimmyT]

Aeronaut wrote: WOW! Just the 1st para looks like the machine I’ve been looking for over in the CVD marketplace. It also gave me some ideas for the onion, since it should be able to handle a drum-shaped blank.

I’m wondering if maybe the best way to build an onion is like orange slices. Design and build 1 slice. Repeat 40 times then fit them together. Could be sphere or cylinder, or anything in between.

Course’ you know everyone’s thinking right now ” Just what combination of input pulse to plasmoid efficiencies, and input to plasma jet increase, and jet to electricity conversion efficiencies will allow us to forgo the x-ray conversion part of this project altogether.” At least for the early production models.

[JimmyT]

I was wondering something similar on a stellar scale. Is there any evidence that the Herbic-Harrow objects are being accelerated. (probably can’t tell, too far away, acceleration too slight, etc.)

Still, maybe over long time spans……

[JimmyT]

Brian H wrote:

As I understand it, the ability of the pulsed FF system to recharge its own capacitors and refire indefinitely means it has infinite Q, the ideal. Perhaps I’m wrong about that, but that’s how I understand it so far.

That’s a good way of putting it. Even if it is only outputting say 1.5 times its input, it recycles the original charge. The rest is coming at you 300 times a second. That’s why it doesn’t need anything like Q=30-50 per cycle to be viable, as some commentators have suggested.

In the end though it comes down to bang for buck. How much net electricity per dollar (including capital payback, fuel sourcing and processing, decommissioning costs, waste disposal, security costs, tea, coffee and so on over the expected lifetime of the machine). Let’s call it $Q.
Yeah; here’s another definition I found: “Q-factor: Ratio of power produced by fusion to power put into the reactor to heat the plasma and drive the magnetic fields. “
By that measure, the Q for pulse 1 is 1.5. For pulse 2 et seq. it is ∞.
But $Q is the overhead costs allocated on a per-pulse basis; lessee:
330 p/s x 60 sec. x 60 min x 24 hr. x 180 days-between-servicings = ~5 billion pulses. Each pulse is worth (¼¢x(5,000kw/pulse)/(330x60x60) = $0.00001. 5bn pulses are worth $50,000. Estimated overheads&amortization per half year are ~ $25,000. $Q is ~2.0. But the “background” power price is around 9¢/kwh (what FF would be replacing), so that 2.0 can be multiplied by ((9 / ¼)=36) = 72. So until “costly” power is entirely supplanted, that would be the payoff ratio ($Q) for putting up new FF generators.

:cheese: :coolgrin: 😆

That number $0.09/Kwh is, I think, a retail number. Which includes billing, transmission and distribution services. I think they call that “at the light switch price”.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epav1/wholesale.html#tab10 Gives a better idea of wholesale prices.

Well, here’s a second source which indicates that Wholesale prices did get that high for 2008. At least for New York. Though they have since fallen: http://www.nyiso.com/public/webdocs/newsroom/press_releases/2010/New_York_Wholesale_Power_Prices_Historic_Low_031110.pdf

I didn’t do any math, but it looks to me like the average of the first tables is close to $30.00/MW. Which translates into 3 cents/Kwh.

So that would be about a 3 month payback period. Still spectacular. And hopefully neighborhood generation will decrease the distribution costs to homes. And large commercial users could install their own units. Avoiding billing, transmission and distribution costs altogether. But all that has been discussed elsewhere in these forums.

Man, do we need this technology, or what?

[JimmyT]

Brian H wrote:

However, the prices would start to drop immediately once FF viability was confirmed. Almost all purchasing is done on a future anticipated demand and supply basis — traders and refiners best guesses.

I’d expect a very short ‘gasp’ in securities prices, but the real action would be in the one to ten year energy sector futures prices. This would be your barometer for when to short the fossil fuels.
Indeed, but those markets would immediately begin to reflect revised expectations; in fact, they ARE purely and simply expectations.

Speaking of markets, I wish someone with more resources than I would fire up the Intrade action by putting a buy or sell bid up!

If I were an oil producing country I would not currently be that enthusiastic about pumping my oil reserves as quickly as possible. Oil is going to go up in price right? Five years from now it will be worth even more than it is now.

But along comes fusion, and all of the sudden the realization that oil is not going up in price, but down. I’d start pumping my reserves as rapidly as possible. That in itself will bring down prices.

[JimmyT]

vansig wrote: At current energy prices, it is considered uneconomical to recover CO2 for sequestration by making dry ice, due to the expense of compression and refrigeration.
“At temperature of 197.5 K (-78.5°C), the vapor pressure of solid carbon dioxide is 1 atm (760 torr). At this pressure, the liquid phase is not stable, the solid simply sublimates.” — http://science.uwaterloo.ca/~cchieh/cact/c123/phasesdgm.html

So, what you’ll want to do, then, is to use cheap electricity to bring down the price of CO2.
Then, sequester as much carbon as you like, via biomass. Carbon recovery by photosynthesis dramatically increases when plants are fed a rich supply of nutrients including high CO2 concentration.

However, this bio-recovery process will probably appear, first, via pumping the effluent from coal plants directly to algae tanks.

Wouldn’t it be a lot simpler and cheaper just to shut down the coal powered plant and use fusion to generate the electricity from the start?

[JimmyT]

Aeronaut wrote: Yep, Jimmy, we’re both talking about the X-ray converter’s thousands of layers being the onion.

Thought so. I just think it’s called the onion due to its “bulb” shape. You think it’s because of the layers. We may well both be right.

[JimmyT]

Rezwan wrote:

FYI, The onion design has been temporarily shelved. The current thinking is that it will be more difficult to manufacture than a simple cylinder shape. Look at the picture Rez’ has posted on the topic titled “Dense Plasma Focus (DPF)” on the home page. It’s a small picture but it depicts a cylinder design. Perhaps later generations of the device can have an onion design, which may well prove to be lighter and more efficient.

Meanwhile, maybe we can harass Rezwan into posting a bigger picture of this variant.

My impression was that it was called an onion because of all those layers…

The onion design – Eric has explained this to me a couple of times. Someone else may be better able to turn this into an article. If you recall, we had an earlier animation that showed a cylinder. This was replaced with the electrode animation. This article posted by Rajdeep Singh Rawat on the DPF website gives some of the science behind the benefits of the “birdcage” electrode design over the solid cylinder. Now to just get something about the science behind the “onion”.

Correct me if I’m wrong Aeronaut. But I think you and I are talking about the X-ray conversion part of the generator. Not the electrode portion, be it either cylinder or rods.

[JimmyT]

HermannH wrote:

Proposing to install more than 10 times the current capacity every year makes us look a bit out of touch

The global economy would have to increase tremendously to consume that energy. In 10 years you would need 10 times as many cars, houses, appliances, factories and batteries to consume all that electricity, and probably more people as well.

One might say this is a good thing. But guess what, all these cars, houses, appliances, factories and batteries need raw materials for building them, they need land, they cause pollution.

Today one of the most limited resources is energy, in the form of oil in particular. Some people are convinced that global oil production will peak during the next decade and will drop significantly thereafter. There is more coal, but even that is limited and the consequences for global warming might make it impossible to use that coal.

Having unlimited, cheap and clean energy will usher in a global economic boom. But eventually other resources will be the limiting factor and bring that boom to an end. And then we may be in a situation where the entire world population is accustomed to a lifestyle that is entirely unsustainable. Just like today we have a situation where the populations in the industrialized nations have a consumption pattern that is not sustainable.

So I am all for replacing all current energy production with FF energy. I am also for significantly increasing the energy consumption and wealth of third world countries. But we should not fall into the trap of thinking that FF will solve all problems and, once we have it, everlasting prosperity is ensured.

I think Focus Fusion is a bit more than that. Focus Fusion may allow us greater access to space, for example. In ways that a sudden discovery of ten times our current oil resources would not.
Yes, it’s an additional resource, but a very sharp new tool as well. Recoverable resources may be increased forever. And not just until a new bottle neck is encountered.
It may allow vastly more efficient recycling too, if you don’t like the inference that space resources will solve all our problems.

[JimmyT]

FYI, The onion design has been temporarily shelved. The current thinking is that it will be more difficult to manufacture than a simple cylinder shape. Look at the picture Rez’ has posted on the topic titled “Dense Plasma Focus (DPF)” on the home page. It’s a small picture but it depicts a cylinder design. Perhaps later generations of the device can have an onion design, which may well prove to be lighter and more efficient.

Meanwhile, maybe we can harass Rezwan into posting a bigger picture of this variant.

[JimmyT]

Pete, you are right. Ethanol does prevent methanol’s toxic effects. (Prevents the formation of formic acid by saturating the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase) But you have to get the alcohol fairly soon after exposure. And with chronic exposure this is a problem.

So let’s hire exclusively alcoholics as our fuel attendants. And make sure that they are drunk all the time in the performance of their duties. Win win.

[JimmyT]

Sorry Brian, I left out the all important comma in my first draft. Changes the whole meaning of my sentence, doesn’t it?

This really is one of those rare cases where you can get something for nothing. You get a fuel with a higher energy content merely by capturing some of the waste heat in the exhaust.

This really does work. I learned this trick in a synthetic fuels class which I took at Ohio State.

[JimmyT]

Pete Keech wrote: Methanol toxicity is not as high as you might think. Ingestion is a minor problem, but not really worse than gasoline or diesel:
http://hawaii.gov/dbedt/ert/new-fuel/files/afrw/afrw-10.pdf

mls for (possible) death:
gasoline 115-470
diesel 63
MeOH 60-240

MeOH also has antidotes (ethanol – amusingly, Fomepizole), unlike gasoline in the case of acute poisoning, so treatment could mitigate some exposure issues.

There is also the lower volatility vs. gasoline, so that is less of a problem (to reach 400 mm Hg at 1 atm, gasoline needs <40 °C vs. MeOH needs °50 C), so overall exposure is lower through inhalation. Not to mention the lower flashpoint & other safety advantages it has over gasoline (environmentally much more benign than petroleum products). You could easily have self dispensation, or dispensation by minimally trained attendants (give them gloves & eye protection). Current propane handling is actually more dangerous, and should have those safety equipment & often don't. Really gasoline should as well, but we've historically decided against that…

As I indicated, EtOH may be a better bet long term (lower toxicity, lower environmental impact), but maybe not – that test will come.

As for “exothermic”… What do you mean? This is CO2 not CO, since CO2 is the problem greenhouse gas, and readily available vs. CO (corrosive, poisonous). Invoking anything with CO in the mechanism allows for the most problematic chemical on our list since gases are so much more difficult to contain. Let’s avoid that.

The reaction to make methanol:
CO2 + 2 –> CH3OH
At 25°C, that has +delta G of 240 J/mol (i.e. you add some form of excess energy), and + delta H of 160 J/mol (i.e. you add this much heat energy to keep temperature constant). That makes it endothermic not exothermic. This is also some of the energy losses you can assume in the conversion process (for which I estimate a low 50% on my previous post), but playing with the temperature (or more likely) pressure could minimize these – high pressure favours CH3OH. That’s why I suggest a target of 90% for the conversion once people say electricity is cheap…

Because the whole system is closed (CO2 & H2 out of atmosphere/ water & put back in at the end), the tracking of energy is easy. It all comes from the generation of the electricity, which is eventually converted to heat by the proposed mechanisms, and you can ignore any individual process along the way. Comparatively, getting fuel out of the ground has an enormous heat energy output (before you even burn it yourself), and the amplification effect of the additional greenhouse gases makes it that much worse.

Finally, this discussion can only really be applied to existing infrastructure, as new infrastructure will undoubtably become electrically based over the next generation if electrical energy is so cheap. Virtually all energy (and nuclear) research funds will go into electrical storage/batteries, and migrate away from liquid fuels (despite their very high energy densities). Cheap/abundant materials will abound, like the aluminum-air battery (very high energy storage per weight, but inefficient electrically, but who cares if electricity is cheap). Aluminum is also cheap, and air is free.
Let’s consider hydrogen within today’s technology: If we could generate cheap hydrogen (amusingly the only hope for the so-called hydrogen economy) it could be cheaply stored (via compression, as liquids, or as solids, as hydrides, etc, etc) using our cheap electricity, and the energy density would be high enough to scrap liquid fuels entirely, as of today.

I wasn’t commenting on your proposed synthesis method. I was trying to point out a way to make it’s use more effecient. Greater range/tankfull. That sort of thing.

As to toxicity. The other petroleum distillates’ toxicity tends to not be cumulative. And I wasn’t talking about death, but blindness.

Doesn’t the synthesis method you propose really go something like this:

CO2 + H2 -> CO + H2O

CO + 2 H2 -> CH3OH ?

Where is the water in your energy ballance? Carbon monoxide IS produced, as an intermediate.

And when you are talking about fuel useage you have to include the heat of vaporization. You are starting with liquid methanol, right?

[JimmyT]

Brian H wrote:

The subject of using methanol as a motor fuel is suprisingly complex.

Point 1: The reaction of making methanol out of Carbon monoxide and Hydrogen is exothermic and reversible. What that means practically is that the methanol contains significantly less energy than the Carbon monoxide and hydrogen that produce it. However it is much easier to store than the component gases. This effect can be used to advantage my adding a “reformer” to each auto. The reformer would use waste engine heat to break down the methanol into the two gases used to produce it which once again will have much more energy than the origanal methanol. Result: an increase of efficiency of about 30%, if I remember my chemistry correctly.

Point 2: Methanol is highly toxic. Even it’s vapors are toxic, and the liquid methanol is readily absorbed thru the skin. The effect of exposure, even low level exposure repeatedly, is irreversible blindness. This material is far too toxic to be used in do it yourself fuel centers. So we would be back to attendants filling your car. And despite precautions, many of them will go blind. So an additional “cost” of widely adopting this fuel will be an army of blind ex-fuel attendants.

This is not meant to be an argument against using methanol as a fuel. It is just to point out a couple of unmentioned considerations.

Since the “waste heat” would be coming from the combustion of the gasses and/or methanol, there would be only a limited benefit, I believe. On account of the laws of thermodynamics and all. :cheese:

No, waste heat would come from engine exhaust gas (waste Heat).

[JimmyT]

The subject of using methanol as a motor fuel is suprisingly complex.

Point 1: The reaction of making methanol out of Carbon monoxide and Hydrogen is exothermic and reversible. What that means practically is that the methanol contains significantly less energy than the Carbon monoxide and hydrogen that produce it. However it is much easier to store than the component gases. This effect can be used to advantage my adding a “reformer” to each auto. The reformer would use waste engine heat to break down the methanol into the two gases used to produce it which once again will have much more energy than the origanal methanol. Result: an increase of efficiency of about 30%, if I remember my chemistry correctly.

Point 2: Methanol is highly toxic. Even it’s vapors are toxic, and the liquid methanol is readily absorbed thru the skin. The effect of exposure, even low level exposure repeatedly, is irreversible blindness. This material is far too toxic to be used in do it yourself fuel centers. So we would be back to attendants filling your car. And despite precautions, many of them will go blind. So an additional “cost” of widely adopting this fuel will be an army of blind ex-fuel attendants.

This is not meant to be an argument against using methanol as a fuel. It is just to point out a couple of unmentioned considerations.

[JimmyT]

Describing progress as lines of finite length, I guess is true. But they are pretty long lines. Eric has assured me that once a commercially viable device has been produced; research will continue. I can envision teams of engineers and scientists working well into the future to make these generators: smaller, lighter, cheaper, more durable, easier to service. Perhaps different variants of the aforementioned characteristics for special settings.

Neutrons aren’t always bad things. We need an ongoing supply of radioisotopes for research and medicine. If we can produce these in Focus Fusion generators, we should. Making it easier to avoid the other F-word (fission).

[Author]

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