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On Wikipedia, it says, “If the plasma is optically thin, the bremsstrahlung radiation leaves the plasma, carrying part of the internal plasma energy.” Does this mean that if it is made to not be optically thin, that bremsstrahlung cooling won’t occur?

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zapkitty wrote:

Sorry that’s not really what I’m asking, and I don’t really understand what “beam” stands for. My questions from post numbers 10 and 12 are what I’m trying to understand – sorry for being thick-headed.

Very short version; A DPF produces a brief plasmoid. As this plasmoid collapses it emits a beam. In a Focus Fusion DPF the beam would be composed of helium nuclei, alpha particles, produced from the fusion of p and B11 in the plasmoid.

The energy total of everything else produced by the FF wouldn’t amount to very much compared to the beam, x-rays and heat.

Vansig said that one-third to one-half of the total output is x-rays. Doesn’t this mean that the output in other spectra would be significant? How do I find the proportions of the various different types of energy outputs? Didn’t they place detectors in there when they were testing it (or is there enough known about this reaction that they could just know all the outputs and their relative proportions)?

Also, are the x-rays all the same frequency? If not, then doesn’t this create an issue for capturing them. I take it this “pulse of charged particles” (loose language in my opinion) is mostly x-rays – but doesn’t it matter that they’re of variable energies? I have watched the Google Talk, but don’t remember seeing these sorts of specifics (or they were merely implied in physicist lingo which surpasses me).

In theory, what charged particle or EM frequency would be the most ideal for converting into electrons using photo-voltaics?

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Sorry that’s not really what I’m asking, and I don’t really understand what “beam” stands for. My questions from post numbers 10 and 12 are what I’m trying to understand – sorry for being thick-headed.

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There seem to be some basics to straighten out here. Can you reply to my questions as well zapkitty?

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vansig wrote: if i recall correctly, the model, with various different parameters, predicts from about a third to half of input energy being emitted in x-ray.

If about 1/2 of the energy from the fusion reaction is x-rays, then of what form is the rest of the energy?

vansig wrote:
the 80% figure for the onion capturing the x-rays might be unrealistic. if we capture its energy with photo-voltaic cells, we can get 10 to 20%. if we capture its energy with a heat engine, we can get about 55%. (but i have not fully explored the possibilities).

Why is the hypothesized (80%) capture for x-rays so much higher than the actual efficiency for photo-voltaic cells? I thought both were capturing energy using the same mechanism…

Furthermore, don’t the outputted x-rays vary widely in frequency?

vansig wrote:
the present set of parameters for attempting break-even is going to try mostly to capture energy from the exit beam. since it consists of a pulse of charged particles, it can be transformed at high efficiency (today’s high voltage transformers routinely achieve 98% or better).

Is the “exit beam” the one-third to one-half figure you stated earlier as the percentage of energy output in the form of x-rays? What percentage of the fusion reaction creates charge particles?

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The next questions (in addition to the ones in my last post) for me are:
1) What percentage of the energy output are the x-rays? That is, in terms of the output of heat and various energies the fusion reaction gives off, what percentage of that energy is represented by x-rays.

2) Secondly, is the 80% figure for the onion capturing the x-rays realistic?

Is the answer that x-rays aren’t a majority of the power output of the fusion reaction (maybe because heat is too) – and additionally – that the onion can’t capture nearly 80% of the x-ray’s power? If that’s the case, then FF needs a different design.

I know that FF has been tested, so what are the numbers for the various forms of energy – and their proportions to one another – that the fusion reaction gave off?

P.S. This raises the question for me:
“What are all of the various types of energy a fusion reaction can produce?” heat, high energy rays (x-rays), etc… So can the primary byproduct of a fusion reaction be on a much lower band of the EM spectrum? Would this help conversion to electricity? (I found something called EMP fusion, but it doesn’t seem to be what I was looking for.)

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Since theoretically this process can scale to ‘better’ than fission reactors (energy density), what is not getting unleashed in these fusion reactors so that they don’t even breakeven? For example, is it because the atoms aren’t fusing at a high enough rate, not enough of them are fusing, the energy output of each fused atom isn’t great enough…? What category do you feel the most energy is lying dormant?

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The reasons as to why the distance from creating net energy is so great aren’t very obvious to me.

Can this be put more simply? To be clear, having a Q of 1 means a reactor can sustain itself, but not create a net amount of energy. A reactor of Q = .75 is producing 75 percent of its own energy for sustenance, but requires another 25% from another power source in order to yield fusion reactors of any sort…?

How does pB11 factor into these results?

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…Does that mean that the best reactor is “1.97e-08” (watts?) below breaking even?!

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I’ll make a project site or something for it pretty soon. I’m in Chicago right now, but I’ll probably be living in California for at least the next few months. When I start networking for it, I’ll be sure to post here too.

(And yes, I don’t think I’d want attempt anything besides a DPF type reactor)

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Anyone want to meet up and start to plan and build or own reactor? Maybe I’ll make an official post later when I’ve time to work on such a thing.

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“The strength of intracluster magnetic fields averages around 3 x 10-6 gauss (G), which isn’t a lot.”

How could they drive cosmic events at this strength?

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I’m not only talking about FF specific experiments, so maybe that page isn’t as appropriate of a discussion forum as this one.

I’m not sure of your web framework issues… Movable Type is okay if it is working for you… I’ve only used python frameworks myself. If you feel a bottleneck in “crowd sourcing,” compiling information on fusion and plasma physics related topics, then I think it is because both of these fields are growing (but are still fairly small in comparison to even closely related scientific fields – like neutronic fusion and projects involving a lot of EM stuff). Anyway, you’re doing a fine job with the web architecture (but feel free to hit me up for IT advice/help Rezwan).

Maybe we could get more professionals and professors to collaborate by posting. Though the web forum concept/behavior is a rather new one, so people that are old enough to be professors might do better replying using interviews, blogs, videos, and the like. I would be happy to start some dialogs – and I did to a small extent when I visited the Alfvén lab at KTH last summer. This needn’t be FF specific either, but like most things related to one another, it has the ability to greatly enrich our ability to work on DPF-related devices.

With supporting a small project comes the issues of having a small community. Learning more about physics and engineering, though, would certainly not be restricted to such a small group of contributors.

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Well, for example the north lights are an electromagnetic effect caused by the sun. They’re easy to see, though – but earthquakes aren’t too hard to measure. Wouldn’t we be able to correlate (strongly) certain electromagnetic events with earthquakes just like we do the solar winds with northern lights.

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I’m not so much interested in prediction as I am proof of causation. Since these EM events scale in terms of power and size, if the sun really has a part in plate tectonics, then shouldn’t it be quite obvious?

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