[KeithPickering]

LPP still has the 0.4 gigagauss number posted on their website. I haven’t seen anything different anywhere.

[KeithPickering]

Wow. Nice catch!

[KeithPickering]

Brian H wrote:

According to this:
http://www.gizmag.com/energy-storage-membrane-created/19996/

500,000X the energy density of capacitors, 12-25% of the cost of LiIon batteries.

Could reduce the weight, cost, and size of FoFus dramatically.

… or not.

It’s desperately needed tech and people are striving mightily to find a way but the chances of any given concept working out are slim at best.

But people will keep trying and one day…

They’re looking for commercial partners now, so are unlikely to be at the vapourware lab stage. I hope Panasonic jumps in and develops it for Tesla.

It’s not vaporware, but it does appear to be at the “lab” stage. It’s very hard to tell without any data or confirmation, and it seems that they’re not rushing to publication. That actually might be a good sign, because it may show that they think this is too important (and commercial) for publication prior to patent.

So we’ll just have to wait and see.

[KeithPickering]

vansig wrote:

From my reading, not so much. You need to alternately heat/cool the ferroic material to make it work, it seems. That takes a while, so although current and voltage look OK on an instantaneous basis, the actual power obtained is low.

but the temperature difference at the transition is small.

True, but a standard thermoelectric can be operated solid-state, with one hot side and one cold side, extracting electricity from the movement of the heat itself. The ferroic material can’t do that. You have to move the material from hot to cold and back again, repeatedly. It’s the phase transition in the material itself that causes the current. It’s hard to imagine a device that can actually do that efficiently.

[KeithPickering]

Brian H wrote: Flipping a “metamaterial” between phases induces current:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aenm.201000048/pdf

Much more effective than thermocouples, it seems.

From my reading, not so much. You need to alternately heat/cool the ferroic material to make it work, it seems. That takes a while, so although current and voltage look OK on an instantaneous basis, the actual power obtained is low.

There has been better & more interesting progress recently on more “standard” thermoelectric materials, including organics.

[KeithPickering]

Got it. A Zap is 1 megawatt-person, for an assumed population of 14 billion. Or, 1 Zap = 14 billion megawatts = 14 million gigawatts = 14000 terawatts. Current worldwide energy usage = 16 terawatts.

[KeithPickering]

Rezwan wrote:

As for the thread concept I, myself, find it pretty meaningless. The X megawatts for X persons for X aeons is too displaced and too subject to gaming.
…

And the answer will be measured in MW per person per millennium.

I hereby call this number the Zap.

I like it! The Zap. Has an electric feel to it as well.

Now to get widespread use of the metric.

Oh, if only you had been minding your units. Watts already has a time element in it (Joules per second). So should a Zap should really be one MJ per person per millenium? But that works out to a measly 3 x 10^-5 Watts per person!

So how about a Zap is 1 MW per person, period? Or a Zap is 1 megaWatt-millenium per person? The first being a unit of power, the second being a unit of energy.

[KeithPickering]

Which is why, if you want to increase the money supply, you don’t give it to banks, rich people, or anyone else who won’t spend it. You give it to poor people, who will spend every dime.

Increasing GDP doesn’t require increasing the money supply. It requires increasing spending. In fact, GDP is spending in the real world for real things, from three sources: consumers, government, and businesses. To increase GDP, you need to increase spending in the real economy (i.e., the economy of real things, as opposed to the paper economy, which is where bank accounts, loans, and the stock market live). Basically, anything that moves money from the paper economy into the real economy increases GDP (consumer loans are a good example). And anything that moves money from the real economy into the paper economy will decrease GDP. (Paying back a loan is a good example.)

That’s also why taxing the poor is bad for GDP (the government will spend less of that money in the real economy that the poor person would), while taxing the rich is good for the GDP (the government will spend more of that money in the real economy than the rich person would.)

[KeithPickering]

Duke Leto wrote:
OK, tomorrow FF generators are perfected and instantly the average cost energy in five years all of the energy in the US is Focus Fusion based and costs 0.1 cent a kWh. That means the total consumer spending on energy is now $26 Billion. Therefore the total GDP is now abruptly $12 Trillion.

We have caused more deflation in the middle of a depression and a sharp contraction in GDP.

In other words, “Congratulations Eric Lerner, you have with the [em]best of intentions[/em] just caused the [em]biggest economic contraction[/em] in US History.”

You were doing just fine up until this point. But now there are a couple of problems with your analysis. First, FF coming online isn’t just waving a magic wand. It will take time, and during that time markets will adjust. So the effect isn’t immediate.

Second, and more importantly, you’re forgetting the Jevons effect (aka Jevons paradox) in which it is shown that more efficient use of energy increases demand. We can expect this to happen here too. In other words, there’s a lot of useful stuff people aren’t doing now because the cost of energy is too high, that they would immediately start to do if the cost of energy were lower. (Desalination of seawater comes to mind, but I’m sure you can think of dozens of other examples.) So with decreasing energy costs, sure, all those people working in coal fired powerplants will be out of a job; but that will be more than made up for by all those other new industries that spring up in the new, low-cost-energy economy. And that’s where the time to come online is also important, because it will allow time for those new industries to get going before the coal fired plants get turned off.

[KeithPickering]

There are a number of open-source FEA packages available. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_finite_element_software_packages for a list.

Does anyone have experience using any of these? (Thinking esp. of Rezwan … )

If not, I note that FRANC2D and FRANC3D are specifically designed to model crack propagation, which is (maybe?) what we’re trying to do here. Their homepage is at http://www.cfg.cornell.edu/software/franc2d_casca.htm

[KeithPickering]

Hi, sounds interesting, and count me in. My computer is a dual-boot Linux (Ubuntu 10.4) and Windows Vista, so I can handle pretty much anything you have. I haven’t done finite element analysis, but I have done other kinds of computation-intensive work like aerodynamics.

[KeithPickering]

Lardenoit’s idea seems like more wishful thinking. No magnetic fields? In that case, what keeps the plasma from touching the wall of the sphere? Nothing, apparently. And when that happens, the ions pick up electrons, become electrically neutral, and whammo, no more plasma. Sorry, no fusion here.

The Maryland experiment seems reasonable: use centrifugal forces to augment the magnetic field, rather than replace it outright. Might lead to interesting results, but again it’s an experiment, not a reactor.

[KeithPickering]

Looks like hokum to me. The fuel collapses gravitationally? And the electrical repulsion, which is 10^36 times stronger than gravity, is overcome … how, precisely?

[KeithPickering]

I hate to be a wet blanket … but half a joule per pinch, even at a 100 hz firing rate, is just 50 Watts …

I guess it’s the demonstration of any net energy, no matter how small, that counts.

[KeithPickering]

The more I think about it … the less and less enamored I am of photovoltaics for x-ray capture. Huge cost, and yet-another untried technology are the barriers. Semiconductors for x-ray PV? Seriously? At ~$1 per Watt, haven’t we lost all cost advantage? And that’s not even accounting for the fact that nobody’s ever actually built an x-ray PV cell, as far as I’m aware, not even in the lab.

Meanwhile, as vansig’s equation shows, a nice source of HOT can make a fabulously efficient heat engine. Old, proven technology, and pretty cheap too. That’s where we need to be looking. And what we need to look FOR is a liquid (possibly a salt, possibly liquid only at high temps) that absorbs well in the FF’s Brehmstrellung band. Regarding materials for high temps, the actual temp of the absorbing liquid is easily controlled by engineering. You could build it for a lot of absorbing liquid at a lower temp, or less absorbing liquid at a higher temp. The temp of the liquid is also dependent on the distance from the x-ray source, which is another way of saying the same thing. These problems look a lot more solvable than x-ray PV’s, at least from where I sit.

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