[Milemaster]

I agree completely.

The science is good, and also the basic understanding, but when the engineering issues become to restrictive, we have to surround the issue (As scientists do when they find INFINITIES). As a suggestion some time ago I found that virtual hollow laser electrodes where available, but not yet developed enough to channel the immense currents. Other helps could be additional magnetic constrictors that might allow more time for fusion to take place before the decay of the plasmoid. Nature does it all the time, some help from astrophysicists could spark the idea

[Milemaster]

There’s a lot of know-how that could be used in this “collaborative environment”. One of the fields could be the plasma simulation software to test concepts. Another field of course is in the materials field. Finally we could have more insight of how they are solving problems common to DPF (Continuous loading/unloading fuel), advanced plasma management etc.

[Milemaster]

Looking to this base ring design, I could not avoid thinking of continuing the 90 degrees groove up to the top of the anode. This provides a Guide or railway to the plasma sheat and could be used in many ways. If they rise vertically ok we will have a concentrated plasma in the points. Looking to images of a used anode, we can see the grooves that the discharge makes trying to get into the center hole.
Now, we could make this vertical grooves slightly Helical, (Rifled) This will induce a circular motion to the plasma, similar to the effect of the coil and improving the filament formation allowing to manage the plasmoid size.

[Milemaster]

Wow!, I thought the gamma where negligible. Anyway the most weight effective shielding would be a Gradient-Z lamination. This construction requires the less dense and shielding materials in front and the more dense on back usually beginning with polyethylene going through scattering materials like Beryllium, tin, copper ending with Steel (In our case stainless). In our case a precise design would benefit from the Gamma ray fluorescence that makes absorbent materials to fluoresce in x-ray wavelength and contribute to the overall efficiency of the photovoltaic/ultra capacitor assembly. The equivalent of 9 inches of lead that would reduce to 1/1024 the gamma ray would be in a stack made of 4 different materials plus the neutron absorbing carbon would have a total thickness of 2,5 to 3 feet.

[Milemaster]

Looking at the post regarding downsizing and its difficulties, I still think that a merging between the Photovoltaic and the ultracapicotrs might solve a couple of the new problems.
Beryllium is a light wheight metal with High thermal and electric conductivity, transparent to most radiations including X-Rays and of course slow neutrons.
Photovoltaic arrays are made with the interface of a metal or electron donor film and must be collected by a conducting media. Recently nanotubes that can be layered and packed on surfaces have been tested as a way of quickly removing the electrons from the donor surface to be carried to the conductive surface.
Now, ultra capacitors are mostly constructed by three layers of conducting surface sandwiching a a high surface area that collect the charges like activated cardon particles or nanotubes.
So tying the knots, we have all the raw ingredients to construct a photovoltaic envelope that stores charges as a capacitor.. But that’s not the whole story.
In this multilayer material there are many layers of thermal conducting material to channel heat outside and the best of this: The nine inches of lead that Eric has calculated as an adequate shielding can be replaced by the one thousand layers of the lightwheigh materials based beryllium, and carbon and hydrogen.
Of course as Impaler mentioned, specialized individual components meet their requirements very efficiently, but adds complexity, bulk and weigh to the reactor as a whole. The challenge is to make the same combined together and shed away some square foots and many pounds the chamber.
LPP does not need to undertake this tasks, Ultracapitors and photovoltaic manufacturers will gladly asign development money to their budgets once that they see the potentials to their markets

References:
NASA STUDY ON LOW ENERGY NEUTRON SHIELDING FOR HIGH ALTITUD AIRCRAFTS: http://es.scribd.com/doc/53707897/Low-Energy-Neutron-Radiation-Shielding

[Milemaster]

Impaler:

Your consideration of not combining PV and capacitors is correct at this moment. The same aplies to the choice of beryllium anodes vs laser guided plasma conduits. Any untested or unavailable technology will only delay the development of a Fusion reactor NOW!!. On that basis y completely agree for a medium sized device. It will be inevitable in a very near future to miniaturize the FF and this will require a second generation device like you mentioned.
An initial 5 MW device would have immediate use placed in the low tension substations transformers to power lets say a couple of blocks in a residential area or a building, chopping off the power plants and medium tension lines in the way.
If we downsize FF to a 400 kw you would have a power for a modern house located far from the power grids, opening new real states location in today’s waste lands, creating gardens, were we now have deserts, frigid landscapes, or seabeds, chopping off the land value to only a fraction of the housing cost.
But downsize it to half of this and you can power a big SUV or, why not, a small personal flying chopper, cutting of the cost of building and maintaining highways, bridges and roads not to mention the trafic jams. We just let the 3D GPS devices create and negotiate the airways as we need them.
As we see all this mouth watering dreams rely on a small, clean and long lasting power device. with more than 80 millions cars produced each year, don’t you think the automakers wont be willing to undertake the development costs, and so the real state developers and government agencies and….you do the math. It will just happen.

Regarding the business model, LPP is not the kind of organization to provide manufacture of any kind (Device or Fuel) and certainly not to provide servicing. A 5-8% license is more than reasonable both as return for the value of the creation of FF power generation and a stimulus to other entrepreneurs to further develop the limitless marketing of such hardware.

[Milemaster]

Impaler:

You don’t have to go to far to get the Hybrid Photovoltaic array; it is powering our next generation of cars and solar generators! Here are some articles that describes couple of this technologies available on the market:

Hybrid combination of Ultra capacitors and Battery’s: http://www.supercapacitors.org/
Hybrid combination of Photovoltaic and thermal collectors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaic_thermal_hybrid_solar_collector
photovoltaic supercapacitor battery hybrid energy: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4629335/4635237/04635510.pdf?arnumber=4635510&authDecision=-203

I have also heard of direct Photovoltaic arrays with Oxygen / hydrogen electrolysis generation built in.

We only have to roam the internet to find this of the shelf technologies. Going deeper into manufacturers and Universities labs there are a lot more innovations that are breeding.
As I see it, Manufacturers have the potential technology to build these hardware and are eager to have a market to serve. Just challenge them to see what they got.

The idea of combining the Photovoltaic and capacitor comes from the need of ultra efficiency in the firing cycles for a commercial device. Lets say we run them at a rate ranging from 100 to 1000 Hz, we will have to reduce, simplify and streamline all the components.

[Milemaster]

Impaler:

I agree completely with you about the cost saving production of rolls of a thin photovoltaic “drum” surrounding a beryllium reaction chamber. Yes my calculations is that almost a thousand of thin sheets would do the job or better one large film rolled one thousand times.
With mass production on my mind I tend to combine functionality pushing the designs to the limit. In this case I would explore the photovoltaic generation with the capacitor function. We always thought of the fast discharge capacitors as a separate hardware. But we can combine these functions including the appropriate conductive layers sandwiched between the photovoltaic film. Anyway this would be a very specialized capacitor, capable of sustaining millions of cycles of almost instant charge/discharges and with an enormous electric tension and intense currents in the connection points. Quite a feat!.

[Milemaster]

Zapicky:ming

You are stating a couple of very interesting engineering problems to tackle. Here are my thoughts of the steps we could take to solve them.

A) Are you intending to have these “cylinders” of fuel plasma conduct the power to drive the formation of the sheath?
Yes the idea is to replace the electrodes by the plasma cylinder. No erosion inside the chamber means less contamination of the fuel but most relevant problem we intend to solve is the shut down of the lasers simultanuosly with the capacitor discharge would achieve a pre firing of all the electrodes surrounding the cathode,

B) Then the fuel for the pinch would be in addition to the “electrodes”?
As a mather of fact, I was thinking that the fuel would be pumped in the chamber as electrodes not as an addition to another intake of fuel.

C) Then are you just shifting the erosion to the physical electrodes supplying the current to the plasma within the beams?
Its a matter of design. Even if there is a remaining corrosion in the interface between plasma and the electrode, it could be shifted outside of the chamber to a better serviceable zone. I could think of a relatively large copper solid pipe conducting the fuel to the chamber’s top plate but electrically isolated from it.
A minuscule hole in the center lodges the gas. This configuration allows a greater surface contact. The discharge would be made trough the external pipe.

D) And what will that pB plasma external to the confinement beams do to them?
Really I would try to minimize unconfined gas. Even with the plasma sheath formation, we could still steer the flow of gas with laser beams. Actually there is a diffuse gas and its reasonable to conclude that during the discharge there is formation of violent and chaotic turbulence that have not been taken in consideration. This produce transitory differences in pre in the plasma zone and outside and an overall loss of efficiency and the need of evacuation of all the Pb after the shot. If we are going to make a repeated firing machine, we need to reconsider the reduction of the loading and unloading of the gas.

E) Doesn’t seem to add up, so what am I missing?
Sure, at a first glance there are many questions to solve. As y begun this thread, we are at a stalemate, and the way to get out of it is thinking outside the box. And a lot of old fashioned brick and mortar, trial and error work is needed. But this is the way engineers do their job, and learn from the experience.

F) Another issue would seem to be that, unfortunately, none of the techniques you mention are scaled to the magnitude of current, pressure and temperature required for pre-pinch plasma.
Yes this is a very common limitation on breakthrough developments. Necessary but infant technologies are not available in the time span we have. Perhaps the engineering solutions proposed, requires techniques that are ahead of this time. But looking at the information of hollow lasers interactions with gases, there is nothing there that cannot be scaled. The setups I have seen for the lasers columns, are just table top devices in a lab. We can wait; we can pick up the job from there and create our costumed device or we continue with more available improvements (Like the beryllium electrodes mentioned as Eric’s choice) but remain vigilant of the progress of the hollow laser technology.

[Milemaster]

Henning:

Here are some references on two methods regarding how to generate a hollow laser beam that filled with plasma can be used as an electrode. Also a couple of articles regarding the containment and movement of particles (In our case decaborane plasma) by means of these lasers.
The idea is to use columns of this hollow beams, just to fill and contain the decaborane gas. Combining both the electric discharge of the capacitor with the shutting of the beams would give the simultaneous discharge that we need.

‘Tractor Beam’ One Step Closer to Reality: Laser Moves Small Particles
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100909173132.htm

Atom guiding and cooling in a dark hollow laser beam
http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v58/i1/p509_1

Generation of a Hollow laser beam by optical lenses
http://www.sciner.com/Opticsland/hollow_laser_beam.htm

Generation of a hollow laser beam by a multimode fiber
http://210.72.9.198/viewFull.aspx?id=COL05080460-3

On another article, not mentioned here, explains that the containment effect is not only by tweezing the brownian movement of particles towards the black core of the laser beam, but also because there is an electric field directed to the center.

Hope this may be useful!!.

Finally I do not see any use of beryllium coating cooper electrodes. The x rays would pass trough the beryllium to finally be absorbed inside the cooper core as I understand.

[Milemaster]

Impaler, your approach is quite reasonable, but as far as i know, repeated fusion has not been achieved, so we cannot build a servicing and franchise business model based on the design we have today. In my mind, I think that even once the fusion is achieved the problems for a repeatable working fusion generator is far from over. Some other posters have mentioned the following hurdles: Cooling, refueling, electrode realignment after every shot and this is only for the actual know design, the worst will be those we do not know yet. We are at a stalemate since a couple of months and we still have to go to aneutronic fusion with decaborane fuel. I think that to move forward we need to make a leap thinking change of the design to tackle problems. Here is some ideas to crush down:

Anode erosion: The straight forward solution would be to make them thicker, or to coat them with a hard conducting metal like tungsten platinum or palladium. The leap thinking solution would be to have no physical electrodes at all and have plasma filed hollow laser beams as confinement. Shut down the laser and voila! the current flows to the anode and by the way, no huge and complicated triggers to achieve timing. The laser beam is only one.

“Onion” x Ray photovoltaic envelope. If needed, this device must be THE containment vessel not an exterior shell of a Stainless steel chamber as now. The leap thoughts are: A) not to have onion x ray photovoltaic device to harvest somehow a 30% energy given away in the fusion reaction, but to have a reflective spherical chamber where the x rays bounce frontally back to further align and compress the diffuse gas in the pinch and plasmoid zone to increase yields and simultaneously allow photovoltaic effect to create an intense positive charge in the wall to create a repulsive electric field electric field to further compress the plasma. Note that both concepts are independently tested on other fussion devices (NIF and Polywell), so this could be an Hybrid solution, further solving the cooling needs.

Of course both concepts development and testing are far beyond the concept FF1, time scale and budget, but the “Keep it simple” is the rule and this are simple solutions.

[Milemaster]

How does the angle between the two fast Alpha particles correlate to the almost linear beam output FF expects to channel trough the coil to extract energy? It seems that this might be a problem or at least a efficiency drop of the reactor. I imagine two situations in which this angle would impair to reach a maximum efficiency.
First: If an axial alignment is reached by means of the magnetic action of the plasmoid, this would contribute to its instability, decreasing size and duration of the reaction, thus less atoms would fuse.
Second: If a non axial alignment is inevitable the alpha particles shooted to the wall of the chamber are lost, its energy transformed in heat and we will need other type of shielding and overcome erosion problems.

[Milemaster]

Surely shooting a tiny Decaborane pellets into the plasmoid will avoid some premature heating problems producing inertial confinement. Y always thought of having a resonant focusing of the x-rays bouncing from a cylindrical shaped chamber to the plasmoid zone as a way both to transfer wasted energy into the reaction an condensing the gas to increase density in the proper region. Other ideas like the magnetic confinement could be developed.

[Author]

Posts