[meemoe_uk]

I’m glad goldilocks is finished. Porridge and honey for breakfast this week to celebrate? That may have been one of the longest bake-outs in history. By comparison I could bake vegetables and fruit in my microwave oven in 2 minutes with the touch of a button back in 1990.

I expect progress at Lawrenceville will be faster now, and hope you get big results soon.

[meemoe_uk]

Well here’s the link to get Monty’s 1st results paper on SAFIRE. Its free but you have to give them your name and address, and then click on a small text download link. takes 3 minutes.
I have a copy so I could upload it and make a direct link under fair use if you want.
The paper doesn’t describe coronal fusion, but it does quantitatively describe corona structure, behaviour, and plasma hydrogen chemistry. Monty said they had evidence for fusion and that’s what he’s working on now.

http://www.thunder-stuff.com/product/safire-paper-1/
( click add to cart button, click checkout button, fill in ID, click place order, click download text link )

You’re right, the coronal fusion model is not yet quantitative. Its currently only empirical and qualitative. But gotta start somewhere.

>There are certainly things in EU that seem to contradict much of what we know of electromagnetism. If the Sun and other stars are positively charged, why don’t they get neutralized? … EU seems to hypothesize a flow of current indefinitely outward from a point

Leif Svalgaard seemed fixated on this same impression of EU and he could never get over it when I tried to discuss EU with him years ago. I don’t know where this idea originates, but its absurd. It may have originated within the gravity-centric cosmology community as a straw-man way of dismissing EU theory. Also EU is a popular front for plasma cosmology so it has a problem with circulating weak ideas that are appealing but not scientifically plausible.

The sun sun’s corona has electrical capacitance in the form of plasma double layers, so it can be charged with an input voltage. No need to violate laws of charge conservation, just need to ask where the input voltage comes from. Broadly the proposed answer is energy comes from coronal nuclear fusion, the electric field comes from plasmoid decay en-mass in the corona, but I’m not clear on the mechanism. I’m looking forward to Monty’s next batch of safire results in June this year.

[meemoe_uk]

If you look back at Eric’s philosophy of focus fusion, he describes it as ‘ a quasar in a bottle ‘, this summary description tells you the goal and the inspiration for focus fusion. Its a long standing inspiration, built over at least 2 generations of plasma cosmologists physicists, going back at least to the 1970s. Quasars were known to have extremely powerful polar jets emanating from a central power source similar to polar beams in laboratory micro plasmoids in the lab.

The base hypothesis of focus fusion is that the physics of cosmo and astronomical polar jets is the same physics as lab plasmoids, just scaled up a few magnitudes.
The base goal is to replicate the physics and harness it as an energy source.

With me so far?
Everything I’ve said in this post so far is just retelling what the FF community have been preaching for decades.

Now, one thing that Eric has said in the past in an attempt to understand astro-jets is that there is a plasmoid in every star, or at least in every star exhibiting polar jets, and that this plasmoid is the source of the polar jet.
This is one assertion he made that I found a bit dubious. It made sense that there was major plasmoidal activity associated with each polar jet source, e.g. stars and quasars, but it didn’t seem certainly right just to assert a causal plasmoid within a star, where the jets punch out thru the stars surface and into space.

Was there another possibility?

Another idea was that the plasmoidal physics occured in a star’s corona. The corona has for decades been known to be a vast volume of multi million degree, thin hot plasma, a good place to prospect for plasmoid physics. But by the 1970s and early 1980s when Eric was getting his thoughts together, the conventional gravity pressure model of the sun had a near total grip on the astrophysics community, with its idea of gravity induced thermonuke fusion in the centre of the sun. Coronal fusion as the power source for stars was simply not considered. And iirc, Eric favoured the conventional model of stars in his cosmo book ‘ the big bang never happened ‘

In the last few years, plasma cosmologists have built up a strong case for coronal fusion as the power source of stars. I couldn’t easily conceive of a plasmoid deep inside a star having polar jets that punched thru the poles of the star. Plasmoid jets made in the corona don’t have this problem, they are already outside the star.

Last year Monty got experimental results strongly supporting the coronal fusion model.

So, remembering the base goal and philosophy of focus fusion community : to create and harness a ‘ quasar in a bottle ‘, they should try to mimic the physics of the quasar as closely as possible.

There are now 4 lines of reasoning that are converging on coronal fusion as the correct way for the focus fusion community to proceed.

1. Empirical : Lab work by Monty is confirming the coronal model of stellar fusion power.
2. Theoretical : Coronal fusion theory better explains observation cosmology i.e. astrophysical jets, and would explain how stars get plasmoid fusion without any scaled up lab equipment such as capacitor banks or switches
3. Practical ( the flip side of theory ) : It would greatly simplify the practically of laboratory plasmoid fusion ( I wrote this in my previous posts : no need for capacitor banks : charge is stored in the double layers of the corona. No need for fast switches, the plasma can discharge very rapidly by itself. No need for high durability or replaceable electrodes : the corona doesn’t require arcs to activate it.
4. Principle : the FF community touts their use of plasma nature as superior to the tokamak’s ‘engineering by force’ approach. Yet FF community persist in engineering most of the physics they need. They should take heed of their own philosophy and be more open and ready to apply ideas that explain how nature creates the charge and switch needed to induce natural electric discharges and hence plasmoids.

Hope that makes sense, but it was worth typing out even if you don’t understand. This is something the FF community will have to come to terms with, the sooner the better!

[meemoe_uk]

>I detect here a level of frustration….The frustration is that the desired breakthrough seems perpetually just beyond our reach.

No thats a different one. The one here is me bumping into the wall of silence that the FF community have built to hide from coronal fusion. I wasn’t aware of it until now, but in hindsight it was possible to work out it existed : there must have been something preventing the FF community from moving up to CF.

the FF crowd rightly touts FF as superior to tokamak because FF uses the natural tendency of plasma to create its own fusion reactor, while tokamak tries to engineer it. But its now clear the FF crowd never took the lesson to heart, because they’ve spent over 60 years trying to engineer the capacitance, switches and electrodes, instead of looking again to the natural behaviour of plasma. That’s the hypocrisy in the philosophy of FF. There’s also some ignorance : stars and quasars do not have capacitor banks or switches or tungsten electrodes. They just have plasma, so we all knew the natural solutions were there, but the FF crowd refused to look.

I’ve found out the FF crowd have a taboo and that is frustrating because I’m disappointed again that scientists run from the truth if they suspect it might undermine years of their work. But its nothing new.
How do most of the tokamak crowd mentally deal with focus fusion? Its the same way most of the FF crowd deal with coronal fusion! They ignore it, or if pressed they just say ” We wish them all the best in their research “.

Whatever frustration I have, I think its less of a negative feel than having half your life’s work being made obsolete by a new tech that comes out just months before you finish your work. Monty will finish safire before Eric finishes FF1. Although atm monty is just experimenting rather than looking to harness the nuclear fusion in his device.

[meemoe_uk]

FF-1 doesn’t work in glow or dark mode.

I already knew that. That’s why it corroded the copper cathodes. A corona doesn’t require arcs, so doesn’t have that problem.

>As cool as SAFIRE is, it can’t work as a fusion device.

Monty has already detected different atomic mass nuclei in the corona chamber after experiments. So its pretty certain it can do fusion. Therefore I can only assume you mean it can’t work as a fusion power device. Sooo…. how do you know it can’t work as a fusion power device? Already spent 20 years experimenting with your own corona setup? As far as I know, no one else has ever tried to do it, you should send your results to Nature mag.

[meemoe_uk]

Also a corona device greatly diminishes a problem that plagued copper electrode focus fusion. There is no arc from the electrode in a corona set up. The charge passes from the electrode to the corona in glow or dark mode. Hence far less corrosion of the electrode and less contaminants in the chamber.

Remember to bore an axial tunnel thru the corona electrode so the ion beams can travel to the output circuit.

[meemoe_uk]

ok, but it was reasonable to expect there’d be more interest on this forum for safire. We’re supposed to like plasma cosmology and plasmoid fusion right? I didn’t expect us just to silently commend the progress of safire, I expected us to discuss the ramifications of safire on theory of fusion power.

For instances, I’m consider myself a noob, but this thought came to me quickly :

The sun, x-ray binaries, and quasars have axial beams of ions. In the lab, the artificial induction and harnessing of such beams is the goal of FF1. It space, its reasonable to assert these beams are created in the corona ( the alternative is any beam that was created inside the star would have to punch thru the outer surface of the star )

Now we have safire producing ultra high power events with its corona. Is there a way they could be made to all fire along an axis? I think applying an external magnetic field or electric field would allign these events. And there ya go. A quasar in a bottle, and a lot easier than FF1. No need for expensive capacitor banks and switches. The corona creates its own capacitance with natural electric double layers and fires itself when its ready. The ion & X-ray absorption chamber designed for FF1 should work for a corona fusion power device just as well.

10 months later, and not a word from the focus fusion community. Did you all think along these lines in the 1970s? Am I behind the times or am I 10 years ahead of you?

How come there wasn’t reports from Lawrenceville and other focus fusions groups back in autumn 2015 saying ” in light of safire, we’ve just chucked out our capacitor banks and switches and greatly simplified our setup to just a 2kW DC corona device ” ?

I’m an engineer myself, and more than once I’ve been in the position where suddenly a new idea or technique obsoletes years of my work. What do? The answer, every time, is to grab the new tech asap and work with it, not ignore it.

[meemoe_uk]

perhaps safire is suspected of ability that outperforms FF1 in its key goal : production of nuke accelerated ions. Its certainly simpler. All thats needed is a way to direct the ions, and safire beats FF1. Remember that plasmoid production en-mass is asserted to happen at all stars. There are no FF1 devices in space but there are lots of coronas, and thats all safire is, an artificial 1.8kW corona that naturally creates 10 MW spikes.

[meemoe_uk]

Yes, and I don’t get why we have radio silence on the safire project from the focus fusion community. They’ve had 10 months to carefully review it. It looks to me to be taboo here just like it is in amongst the gravity-centric astro community.
Odd really, the volt spikes that safire detected are likely from collapsing plasmoids within the corona. I’d’ave thought the leaders of the FF community would have given safire full open support. And barely a peep from the orderlies. Has one of the FF overlords issued a decree for silence on safire?
It could be a conspiracy.

[meemoe_uk]

this is just my idle speculation : I thought the goldilocks bake out plan was a bit weak. I didn’t understand why they didn’t just strip out the mylar, do a high temperature bake, then put it back together. They’d just taken FF1 to pieces to get it coated with titanium nitride weeks before, but now another disassemble was not considered for an optimal bake out?

I’m guessing based on my interpretation of the info in the reports, the goldilocks plan may not have succeeded. Just being skeptical as all scientists should be + its fun to guess !

[meemoe_uk]

Thanks for fast reply. Please excuse the tone of that 1st post. I’m a big fan of your work on focus fusion, but I feel frustration at the reports over the last year which seem to be mostly a continuum of minor technical problems made slow to fix due to lack of resources.

[meemoe_uk]

>…lads and lasses!
Are you a yorkshireman?

[meemoe_uk]

Over a month on from the October 6th report where the problem of oxidizing chrome steel was diagnosed, FF1 parts have been prepared for titanium coating and have now been sent off to be coated.
Currently waiting for them to come back.

http://lppfusion.com/cooperation-aids-oxygen-elimination-vacuum-chamber-getting-titanium-nitride-coating/

[meemoe_uk]

well if the cause is chrome steel that should be easy to fix. I’d replace it with titanium.

edit 1 : They’ve had > 6 weeks to fix it, so I’m guessing its already fixed and they’re now onto something else.

edit 2 : wow, i’ve just seen their Oct 6th report, my titanium recommendation was the right one!

[meemoe_uk]

> In addition, we are working out theoretically ways to transfer more of the energy from the electron beam to the heating of plasmoid, leaving less available to damage the anode. This work involves mixing in heavier gases and is still under way.

What about increasing the pressure?

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