[mchargue]

This particular camera/light source combination makes a movie by taking a picture sometime after the pulse of light has been output. By varying the time delay from the pulse to the picture, it can stitch together the pictures into the semblance of a movie. A neat idea, it relies on the fact that the path & time-of-flight of the pulse does not change at all, pulse after pulse.

If the pinch DPF’s pinch is absolutely repeatable, pulse after pulse, a similar method could be used. However, from my reading of the results, it can not be repeated that well.

Still, a technique like this might offer some insight into the processes taking place in the chamber. Here’s hoping that, if it’s applicable, they use the idea.

Patrick

[mchargue]

Brian H wrote:

I think this is a good opportunity for us to introduce to many of these activists the idea that aneutronic fusion can be the key answer to climate change.

Hm. You’re making the assumption those goals are an end, not a means. Probe a bit; you may discover otherwise.

Are you implying some other agenda motivates the environmentalists? Heaven forfend. man! I supposed you’ll tell me next that politicians don’t have my best interests at heart…?

[mchargue]

KickStarter requires that you produce a ‘deliverable’ – which is to say a product that you can send as an premium to backers. WHen I contacted KickStarter to ask about funding the research done in pursuit of FoFu, they said it didn’t comport with their goals & practices.

I think that Indie GoGo is likely a better funding mechanism for pure science,
http://www.indiegogo.com/

That said, there may be other crowd-funding means out there that I don’t know about.

Someone on this board needs to win the lottery!

Pat

[mchargue]

asymmetric_implosion wrote: Lerner: You don’t need 10 people to design a switch that already exists. (http://www.amazing1.com/sparkgap.htm) Scroll to the bottom. Look at Rail gap. Typically a 16 week lead. Switch N2 to Ar-O2 (10%) as listed by Maxwell pulse power and you get a 75 kV, 1 MA switch. This is not the first time I’ve said it and I’m sure John Thompson has mentioned it to you more than once as John introduced me to the switches. You need a ~100 kV trigger to take them down with ~10ns jitter. North Star High Voltage can build it if they have the time. Richard Adler is one of the best if not the best person for the job. I have used North Star triggers at ~40 kV with a jitter of 20-30 ns for years and we have never had a problem that wasn’t our own doing. We run up to ~100 kA per switch for over 10,000 shots without opening the switches for cleaning. I’ve run over 1000 shots without changing the working gas. You should be able to get at least 250 shots without any maintenance. Maintenance is polishing the rails and wiping away any built up deposit. Takes about 1-2 hr per switch at most. (Brian L. Bures, Mahadevan Krishnan and Robert E. Madden “Relationship between Neutron Yield and Macro-scale Pinch Dynamics of a 1.4 kJ Plasma Focus over Hundreds of Pulses” IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci. Vol. 39 No 12 pp 3351-3357 (2011) doi: 10.1109/TPS.2011.2170588)

If you don’t like the Rail gap, look for the MMCS switch the French use on the Sphinx machine (50-100 kV, 1 MA). Sandia uses laser triggered spark gaps with 1 ns jitter so there is always that option if you want to spend the money for four of those.

You speak of the black art of pulse power and I agree to a point. I am no pulse power expert, more of a dabbler and user, and there are three (really two as Sandia’s switch costs way too much) alternatives that will work without designing a custom switch and are much faster than 20 mon.

Vacuum leaks: Derek is on the right track. Buy an RGA and find the leak with helium. RGA is 4-6 weeks away from SRS if they don’t have one in stock.

Joe: My frustration is that it looks like we will see a 1000 ways to make a PF pulse power system wrong before it is made reliable. There are at least 3 if not more 300-500 kA machines in this country put together on a shoe string budget. One might say that they are not as big but they contain all the key parts to make a 3 MA machine. I know Eric has hardly talked to our group at AASC. I get it; we are a company. I know KSU folks helped build the machine but I don’t know more than that. The UNLV folks used a design by Bruce Freeman, formally of Texas A&M, now with Raytheon (probably designing the new switches). Bruce operated a 2 MA PF at A&M for years and I’m sure he didn’t have these problems. NsTec has a 3 MA PF and I’m pretty sure they don’t have these problems. There are always the folks at NTU/Singapore, DENA or Pavel Kubes. There are a number of folks in the US and around the world that have solved these problems and moved on to study the physics. The PF community is very open to new members and very willing to help whether it is physics, pulse power or components. Great in roads have been made between LPP and physicists around the world (Iran, UK) but why are they not seeking help from an expert in pulse power that would visit and clean up the pulse power problems? This is my concern for LPP in more detail.

I really appreciate the small group as the AASC group is only 4-5 and I know the struggles. The key for us was to bring in folks that were experts as consultants at the right time. We let them solve the problem and tell us to become users and more slowly advanced users. We will never replace these experts in skill but we learned to stand on our own. When we trip, we run back to them asking for more help. We had a good team in place and we still had to talk to experts to keep moving forward. I can tell you that it never took the experts more than a few weeks to identify a problem and propose a fix whether it was a switch, transmission line or machining problem. The parts can take a while but more than a few months seems unreasonable.

As always, watching you & Lerner speak in the same venue is interesting, and informative. I’m still down with the idea of setting up a tip-jar for Asymetric’s plane ticket so that you can both speak face to face.

I also like the idea of a laser-triggered spark-gap. Pushed for that idea myself here for some while.

Asymetric: I like the idea of employing/asking experts to contribute their expertise in narrow, but very important, fields to further LPP’s DPF research. That’s why I think this forum is so important. It gives people a chance to see what’s going on, what needs exist, and to contribute what they can. An example I would cite is your own empirical experience with DPFs.

Lerner: I hope that you’ll continue to discuss both the technical problems that you encounter, as well as the results as you develop them. In depth. I believe that the more information that you put into these forums, the more that you’ll get from them. I know that it’s a commitment in time & effort, but this is an easy way to reach a large, and interested, group of people. The stable of people that read this regularly might be able to fill in the gaps you mention in the papers they print; those dull results that don’t get written up, but are important pieces of hand-me-down knowledge from their own tests.

I think that Asymetric’s contributions make the case for this.

Patrick

[mchargue]

annodomini2 wrote:

All that high-powered laser technography just lying around, and too big to strap to a sharks head…

Build a bigger shark 😉

Megladon?

Coming to the SyFy channel soon…

[mchargue]

tcg wrote: No one should be surprised at this.

Not surprised in the least. All that high-powered laser technography just lying around, and too big to strap to a sharks head…

[mchargue]

Thanks for carrying on this discussion here, folks. It’s fascinating, and feels like a chapter out of a John W Campbell book. I also feel like everyone here should chip in for a plane ticket for asymmetric so that you guys can sit down & talk this out. Sign me up to contribute to that!

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the posts between the two of you, and reading what you both write individually.

Patrick

[mchargue]

So far as I know, fusion is defined by: (the mass of the reaction products) < (the mass of the mass of the reactants) The difference is released as energy.

[mchargue]

zapkitty wrote:

This article indicates that a particular tungsten copper alloy may have the longest electrode life.

… but copper and tungsten are not particularly transparent to x-rays and beryllium is. It’s a heating problem.

I’m sure that LPP would be glad if it turns out they can get by with just copper electrodes for the production units but it seems they are planning on having to use beryllium.

How much heat are we talking about? Haven’t you already decided that you’ll need some kind of cooling system for the electrodes?

Maybe when things shift from research to production this will look like a better option.

[mchargue]

ikanreed wrote:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/nasa-working-on-lightweight-z-pinch-and.html

Here’s the NextBigFuture’s page, with links to more data, like a PDF on the thruster itself.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/nasa-working-on-lightweight-z-pinch-and.html

Cheers

That’s the same link as the OP posted.

Your are correct – my bad.

Still, look over the link, and the PDF on the thruster that’s there. Pretty cool.

[mchargue]

dennisp wrote: http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/nasa-working-on-lightweight-z-pinch-and.html

Here’s the NextBigFuture’s page, with links to more data, like a PDF on the thruster itself.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/nasa-working-on-lightweight-z-pinch-and.html

Cheers

[mchargue]

Good. I didn’t remember that this was the same organization. Lost track of my links…

Pat

[mchargue]

OK, a new crowd funding source may have opened up. The article is,
—–
Got a cool idea for a research project, but need funding? Check out Petridish.org, which has just launched crowdfunded science and research projects. I think this is a really great idea that could open up funding for some amazing research ideas.
—–
http://www.kurzweilai.net/crowdfunded-science-projects?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=09ea6353f6-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email

The organization, http://petridish.org/
Funding for science projects, http://blog.petridish.org/2012/03/06/petridish-org-launches-first-group-of-crowdfunded-science-projects/

Maybe this is worth looking over?

Patrick

[mchargue]

I see. Excellent that you tried. Sorry it didn’t work out.

You’ve looked into other crowd-funded means? (probably, I’m thinking)

I’ll write to those that I know of. Maybe they’ll be more interested this go ’round.

Pat

[mchargue]

AaronB wrote: This map of galactic magnetic fields shows the prevalence of magnetic fields in interstellar space. Magnetic fields cause the polarity of light to align with the fields. This is called the Faraday effect. The polarity of light is the axis of the angular momentum of the photon. It is my opinion that it takes energy to change that polarity, just like it takes energy to change the axis of a spinning bicycle tire. Since the speed of light is fixed in a certain medium, the only way for a photon to lose energy is in its frequency, or the speed of its spin. Since a photon is essentially massless, it would only lose a tiny bit of energy when its axis of rotation was changed, so it would only experience a tiny redshift with each change. However, a photon traveling for billions of years through many different intergalactic magnetic fields would, it seems to me, experience a significant amount of redshift that would be roughly linear with the distance traveled, depending on the number of magnetic fields it encountered along the way. If this hasn’t been proposed before, we can call it Faraday redshifting. It avoids the scattering problems of other tired light proposals. What do you think?

The article didn’t discuss red-shift of the light, merely its polarization. I think that looking for a red-shift would be a good idea, but I can’t deduce it from what was written.

BTW: “Faraday redshifting” is a good name!

[Author]

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