[TimS]

My interpretation, which is why I said “essentially …”. It says that the electrolysis is powered by the battery, no other source of power. Since the battery is powered by the alternator, and the alternator by the engine, the car runs without any input power.

[TimS]

Joseph Chikva wrote: Electrolyze or thermonuclear?
Hydrogen can be burnt in engine. And that is not a problem – in fact very limited alterations are required.
In Soviet Union in 70s hydrogen powered passenger plane TU-154 with cryogenic hydrogen tanks flied.
But hydrogen as such has very non-attractive energy per volume density and electrolyze of water is very energy intensive.
Due to today’s ratio of prices between natural gas and kW*h of electricity industrial scale production of hydrogen is conducted with the help of steam reforming method and not electrolyze. And both methods are chemical and not nuclear.
Here is a link of elecrolizers for hydrogen production from water (in Russian): http://ekb.ru/production/14

In that patent I see not nuclear but conventional electrochemistry cell for splitting water. For running of which the energy is required from externally.

Certainly, a car powered by stored hydrogen is an interesting concept. However, in the patent, the hydrogen is obtained by electrolysis in the car. The patent states that this cell is driven by a circuit powered by the battery. The patent states that outside of these fuel supply additions, the construction of the rest of the car is conventional. Specifically, it shows an alternator connected to the engine, which would charge the battery. There is no hydrogen storage.

The system is essentially a perpetual motion machine based on the idea that electrolysis can create hydrogen that can then be burned for more energy than was required by the electrolysis. In fact the system could be turned directly into a perpetual motion machine by taking the water vapor exhaust, letting it condense, and feeding it back into the electrolytic cell. The reason this is relevant to this thread is that the author of the patent is the same person behind the company this thread is about, and the technology discussed in this thread is a continuation of this hydrogen technology from 30 years ago, although with added muons.

This perpetual motion idea is being widely marketed on the internet today by various “water powered car” web pages. I have not seen any link between these pages and the author of this patent, although there are references to this person as a creator of the technology. Such pages typically sell a design for around $50, and have claimed many tens of thousands of customers. People are desperate to find cheaper fuels. If LPPX had these millions of dollars, the world might actually have cheaper fuel by now. Also, when I heard about this a few years ago, I spent hours on the web trying to find a report from someone who had bought one of these designs and said that it did not work. I could not find anyone, although such a report might have been buried in the thousands of web pages of resellers claiming that it did work. I did find semi-credible claims that adding a small amount of hydrogen to the fuel mixture might improve gas mileage of older vehicles with poor mileage to begin with, but that is not what is depicted in this patent or what is being sold in most of these web pages.

[TimS]

Don’t think so, guys.

The founder, the current chairman’s father, is Stephen Horvath. He still appears to be the senior scientific person at Star Scientific, at least he is the elder gent sitting at the instruments in the videos on the website.

This is the same Stephen Horvath involved in the “water powered car” silliness in Australia back in the ’70s. He was sufficiently convincing back then that he actually had a senior politician, Queensland’s premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, host a public display of the car. Unfortunately, it would not start and his mechanic was at the pub.
Horvath’s hydrogen Fairlane – The Courier-Mail

He claimed at the display that the car was powered by thermonuclear reactions. However, he actually got a patent for it back then,
United States Patent 3,980,053 – Google Patents
which depicts a car running by burning hydrogen created by electrolysis powered by the car battery charged by the alternator… so there was no fusion or muons involved, just many gullible people. He claims in the patent that his key innovation was a circuit that increases the electrolysis speed, generating hydrogen fast enough to power a car, as if that was the problem with this concept.

This gentleman may well be an excellent engineer. I believe the water powered car people are still selling the circuit in his patent for driving the electrolysis, with the caveat that you can’t sue them if it doesn’t actually work to run your car on water. Hovarth Energy Australia, created around the water powered car, became Star Energy a little over a decade ago. Now it is Star Scientific. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

[TimS]

jamesr wrote: I was thinking more on the lines that there are many areas of the world with much higher natural levels of radiation than would be permitted in the US or most countries if from man-made sources. There is no evidence that people living in these area are affected adversely in any way (such as higher cancer rates). Some studies even show beneficial effects.

See for example http://hein.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/risk13&div=6&g_sent=1&collection=journals

I have recently seen the reporting of beneficial effects misconstrued by popular TV commentators to be that scientists generally consider radiation exposure below radiation sickness levels to be beneficial; and that radiation risks are scare tactics used by politically motivated nuclear protesters. It is unfortunate that talk of these beneficial effects leads to people ignoring risks that are accepted by an overwhelming scientific consensus to occur at some exposure level.

Have people actually been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation from nuclear power? There are reports of radiation exposure hotspots outside of the Fukushima evacuation perimeter, including this one that amounts to hundreds of millisieverts a year:
http://mobile.france24.com/en/20110330-greenpeace-says-japan-evacuation-zone-small
Perhaps greenpeace is not the most acceptable source for this type of report, but the government reports exposure of many people to over tens of millisieverts a year; some exposures would be more concentrated than that. The permitted level is only 1mSv/year, which does not seem very relevant in this case.

I guess all this is off-topic from the NIF. However, it seems to me real risk of significant unsafe radiation exposure, as well as pollution from other sources such as coal power plants, is not acceptable and the world really needs something like aneutronic fusion.

[TimS]

The article discusses using this engine for satellite station keeping, so it only needs a small force if it is on a significant time. At 100,000 alphas per pulse and 75MHz, I get 3.5 watts out and 0.6 micronewton (total momentum all alphas all directions times alpha generation pulse rate). This is likely not enough force for anything useful but I expect there is a lot of optimization to be done. It talks about being possibly only 50% efficient; perhaps some of the alphas going in the wrong direction are expected to be lost. Would depositing a few watts of alpha particles into the boron and metal film layers destroy them? How long would that take?

Note this is not a very efficient rocket in terms of force / power, because the high velocity of the alphas cause them to require large kinetic energy. However, the point is to optimize fuel use. I calculate boron used at 0.05 ng/sec, or 1.6 mg/year if the device is always active.

[TimS]

But if you cannot say there is no safe level, does that not mean that there is a safe level? What is it? Exposure below background is one thing, but going from there to saying low doses above background are safe because the statistics are flimsy seems like the wrong way around; if the statistics are flimsy we should not consider something to be safe. I’m thinking Fukushima and measured radiation “hot spots” outside the evacuation perimeter above background, that are considered “safe” because they happen to fall on a particular side of this flimsy fence. Perhaps, if all nuclear is replaced with aneutronic fusion, we will never need to know what the real safe level is.

[TimS]

markus7 wrote: Could you explain what you mean by “add a slight inductance at the base of the main electrodes”?

“Inductance is the property of an electrical circuit causing voltage to be generated proportional to the rate of change in current in a circuit.”

A current divided in N paths may not divide evenly if the paths are not symmetrical. However, by adding an equal impedance to each path, the current will divide more evenly. An series inductance is an impedance at high frequencies. This is a bad idea for the main cathodes for the reason stated by the previous poster- for a maximum current per voltage the cathode inductance should be reduced.

However, if it is desired to use the tungsten pins instead of the knife edge, it might help to add inductance to the pins. The main current is through the main cathodes, not the pins, so decreasing pin current would not be as bad. Inductance in the pin effectively filters out the higher frequences of current change through the pin, so that it would take time for a current path to build up from the first firing pin to the anode, and by then the current might have started from the other pins. The inductance of each pin could be increased by bending it into a spiral.

[TimS]

Clearly, if the knife edge on the new electrode plate works, then this problem is solved.

EDIT: I proposed bending the pins inward toward the anode to fix the asymmetry if it persists. After checking the photo in the article, I see that I misunderstood where it said that the problem pins were higher than the others. It looks like they are longer, not shorter (or more eroded). In the article, it says that they fire first because the tips are closer to the end of insulator, not the base as I had thought. In this case erosion of the pins would have gotten rid of the asymmetry even with straight pins, but that does not seem to have happened. The ends of the pins do not look eroded away to me. I wonder what feedback mechanism is making the asymmetry worse as more shots are fired? Perhaps the filament of current leading from the pin to the anode generates a force which pulls the pin further downward? Perhaps the asymmetry is caused by a tiny diffusion of some conductor from the plasma filament onto the surface of the insulator? Maybe a different composition of insulator would help.

If the problem persists with the knife edge, I wonder if there would be some way to add a slight inductance at the base of the main electrodes so that the current sheath could be created to the knife edge (or pins) all around before lifting off to the electrodes? Perhaps returning to pins and adding a slight inductance in each would slow the current rise through the first pins and allow other pins to become active? I should go back to my old basic electronics class and work out the inductance and timing of the pins as they are…

Although the previous poster’s suggestion of using ‘laser spark plugs’, completely removing the need for high speed synchronized switches and the knife edge or pins, sounds pretty cool.

I had initially thought that the negative side of the capacitors was switched into the cathode electrodes separately, instead of having the positive side of the capacitors switched and then tied together to the anode. That way the shot energy would always be divided evenly between the electrodes. I had thought the circuit worked this way when I saw all those switches, specifically in order to avoid this problem of asymmetric current through the electrodes. I spent some time yesterday confusedly looking at the focus fusion pictures on flickr (aren’t they cool!) trying to figure out why the problem occurs before I realized I had it backwards. I had been wondering how all those separate circuits were synchronized so precisely… A schematic of the focus fusion device would be great.

[TimS]

I see nothing about a source of magnetic force in this article, but the description starts by saying that a very strong electric force is created when the laser drives electrons off the foil, which is next to the boron film. The electric force would be in the correct direction to drive the alphas. Would this force be strong enough to reverse the path of high speed alphas heading toward it? Apparently it is strong enough to strip protons from metal nuclei… (is this really what is meant?)

Also, given the second to last paragraph of the article, it does not sound like Chapman has missed these problems:

The NASA engineer acknowledges that this collection of ideas is still a long way from being a practical device. For example, losses from the alpha particles striking the walls of the exhaust nozzle or each other lower the net power output. [em]Figuring out how to control the particles’ path is an important consideration.[/em]

[TimS]

You folks might want to define membership (like the other poll did), then put in a link to a signup (pay dues) page.

[TimS]

I think the recent huge progess in the focus fusion DPF results following what appeared to be not so much (or reverse) progress for a time has as much to do with human factors (Mr Lerner moving his efforts to a different environment, changing the goal from more “researchy” to more “developy” which requires better infrastructure, funding) as the characteristics of the DPF process itself.

[TimS]

I think I read somewhere that Eric said making the focus-fusion device smaller was technically better, but that the electrodes needed to be a certain minimum size so they are not damaged by the electro-magnetic forces on them during pinch, which limits shrinking the device. Someone more informed please correct me if I’m wrong.

Also, the focus-fusion device actually IS pretty small. The reactor is about the size of a coffee can, if I am not mistaken. I am not sure what the size of the X-Ray capturing “onion” around it is projected to be. I think a big part of a real device is the shielding required by the radiation from the side reactions, which might not be reduced significantly for a lower power reactor because the side reaction radiation would still be the same type and energy, just with a lower count.

I expect that the geometry of a focus fusion device and the temperature and pressure requirements for fusion ignition have a significant influence on the voltage and current required for pinch, no matter how much reactant is desired to be fused. The pinch voltage and current determine the input power. If this is the case and only a small amount of reactant were fused, the device would not achieve break even. To achieve a lower output one could run the device at a lower pulse rate, which would reduce the maintenance requirements, but I do not see how that would make the device significantly smaller.

Other technologies than focus fusion would scale differently, but in general fusion requires a high enough temperature and density for ignition. For technologies I am aware of this requires significant energy, so they will not achieve break even without enough reactant. However, this argument does not apply to non-pulsed technologies such as Tokamak, which have their own problems if the device is too small.

[TimS]

zapkitty wrote:

Rossi, and perhaps Focardi, have been funding their E-Cat project entirely on their own, with no one else’s money.

This falsehood has recently been shot down over at talk-polywell… which fact may go far in explaining you suddenly popping up here.

http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/MacyDefkalion.pdf

http://ecatnews.com/?p=126

… apparently Defkalion is not spme sort of an “independent” company but is actually a collection of Rossi investors.

$200 million euros already and selling licenses for a technology even the inventor says won’t be actually validated until next year… if ever…

… funny that you didn’t mention any of that.

Seems as if T-P has a dual personality… the posters can and have done quite credible work in deconstructing questionable scientific claims such as E-cat… as long as scientific subjects don’t touch on wingnut hot-button issues such as climate change 🙂

What Rossi has always said is completely consistent with the references in the above post, that Defkalion is building a factory to make new E-Cat reactors, and that they are therefore essentially investors in Rossi’s technology. He says they are not funding the initial megawatt combination of E-Cat reactors, instead they are paying for it to be used in their factory after it is delivered to them and it checks out in October or later. He also says that he has finished construction of the hundreds of E-Cat that go into the megawatt combination, and is currently testing them. Defkalion being E-Cat factory investors is not inconsistent with him doing all the work up to demonstrating the megawatt reactor using his own funds. Nor is it inconsistent for him to have other licensees lined up after Defkalion.

However, he has received money from AmpEnergo.
AmpEnergo – NyTeknik

Obviously, it is questionable to consider Defkalion an independent evaluator of the megawatt E-Cat reactor, when Defkalion is being set up to manufacture E-Cat and is an investor in the technology. Not much independence there, especially considering that no other independent evaluations have been allowed. As I see it, we have no hard information on the E-Cat reactor one way or another, and it looks like we won’t until either we have one in our hands or the whole project falls apart. Personally, if I had 200 million euros, I think it would be a better bet to put it on F-F.

[TimS]

Tokamaks were claimed to be an engineering project, but when I looked at what people have actually been doing in the tokamak field for the last decades they have been doing what looked an awful lot like plasma research. “Just need to figure out one last instability mode…” GF looks to be doing engineering. If the “good dog” gets too squirrely in the sub-millisecond of compression, or MTF fails in their reactor environment, then this just isn’t going to work. Not all engineering problems are solvable.

[TimS]

From the CNN article,

General Fusion aims to achieve net gain fusion experimentally in 2012. By 2018, it plans to complete a power plant prototype that would generate 100 megawatts, enough to power about 100,000 homes.
“We would like to be in a commercial stage of being able to take orders and build power plants by the end of the decade,” said Michael Delage, General Fusion VP of business development.

If I understand correctly from this and several other sources, the General Fusion guys are building a demonstration reactor right now, not just a research device. As far as I know this is a new thing and breaks the current fusion paradigm. Instead of being some giant (ITER, NIF, etc) project, or some cool little plasma research project (LPPX, PWELL, etc), they are using an already developed plasma manipulation technology (MTF) that has not provided critical plasma parameters for fusion tied to a chamber with 200 air hammers… Basically about as brute force as you can get, ugly, expensive, radioactive, but they are building a fusion reactor out of it right now. If it works it will shatter the Tokamak paradigm that you need 10-100 billion dollars and 20-40 years to build a demonstration fusion reactor, and finally more sensible fusion technologies, such as DPF, might get some real funding.

General Fusion Reactor Diagram
They are building a 3m diameter sphere with places for 200 big air hammers on the outside, and MTF spheromak (semi-stable plasma rings, like plasmoids but much larger) generators at the top and bottom. The MTF technology has already been well developed elsewhere, there is a guy at Los Alamos interviewed in this article who has been working it for decades, but it has not achieved critical density / temperature for fusion. By banging a few dozen hammers and focusing the shockwave inside the sphere with a fluid, spheromaks at the middle should go critical. Banging some hammers on a fluid filled sphere is not exactly new science- this is just a massively complicated engineering problem (mostly involving synchronizing the hammers). As the article says, shortly (within a year or so) they plan to have built enough hammers and a good enough synchronization system for a critical reactor that achieves break even.

Then there are a couple of years for practical issues- their demonstrations so far have used water as the fluid and a tube through the water for the plasma which gets crushed by each shot. The plan is to use molten lead for the fluid to protect from the fusion neutrons, with molten lithium in the lead to breed tritium as a source for DT fusion, and spin up the molten lead lithium mixture to make an opening in the middle for the plasma like the opening in water as it spins around a sink before going down the drain. They also will need to build the rest of the 200 hammers the system needs for full operation, all synchronized to generate a shockwave in the middle on time-scales of 1-100 microseconds. These are engineering issues, no plasma research and nothing ‘scientific breakthrough’-ish about it.

Once they get all this to work, they shoot it once a second, take heat out of the molten lead using a heat-exchanger / steam turbine combo, and they have a fusion reactor power generator. This is a big-ugly-absolutely no finesse way of getting MTF to work, not very attractive to your average fusion scientist, but the thing is it is just an expensive engineering problem. The Los Alamos MTF researcher says if they can solve their engineering issues to provide the needed shockwave, then it should generate the output energy they claim. The guy named Laberge who dreamed all this up was engineering parts for Kodak printers, but he actually got his doctorate in plasma physics when he was younger and was interested in fusion at the time, and he decided to go back to his roots and do something for the world. His company is getting the money it needs. A fund with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, just put in $20 million, and they already had millions.

I think it is quite possible General Fusion will be selling reactors before there is a prototype DPF. And their reactors will be big, ugly, noisy, expensive, deal with bunches of radioactive material from the tritium and high energy neutrons, and not very reliable. Kind of like first generation analog cell phones, but radioactive. Did I mention expensive? Consider heat exchangers and steam turbines, interfacing with molten lead laced with radioactive tritium. However, for comparison current power reactors cost billions of dollars.

tl;dr

My point is their success could be a very good thing for the fusion field, and for LPPX in particular. How many billions of dollars every year are invested in cell phone technology these days? Would all that money be invested if passing the initial hurdle of demonstrating some type of cell phone had not occurred? Why does DPF need to be the first commercial fusion reactor? Once we get past investors thinking about fusion as something that will never actually happen, to investors thinking about the merits of various types of reactors, I expect DPF to take off. Especially considering the radioactive part.

[Author]

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