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I’m not saying this is how they do it.. but it could work exactly this way:

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zapkitty wrote:
errrrrr…. if multiple coils are to be considered part of the learning process then that would seem to imply that we are already sure about that much regarding the structure of the alpha recovery system. .. are we?

Thus far I have only scratched the surface of the design criteria. The coil designs need to be modeled with a magnetics simulator to hammer out number of coils, number of turns, number of windings per coil, wire diameters, etc. Particularly, the question of whether this transformer would benefit from a high-permeability, low-reluctance core has not been studied at all. It is possible that it is not necessary to keep the coil inductance down to nanohenry range, since the production reactor will be doing ~1 k shots/s.

I am pretty sure that each coil must be high quality, implying very low series-resistance, implying fat wires, or possibly even superconducting. I am expecting that it will be high voltage, relatively low current, in comparison to the input pulse. (ie: megavolts), but not certain.

Electrical engineers assure me that transformer coils are regularly >95% efficient. But they warn that, to design a transformer without solid understanding of the physics will fail. We will probably end up running thousands of simulations before construction. And maybe make small-scale mock-ups.

[vansig]

as drawn, that looks to me like it’s in perspective.

this is more representative of the shape i’m thinking of. notice, the conductors are flat, and aligned radially to the axis of the beam:

Attached files

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would the coils not be larger as you move away from the chamber? since the wavelength of the beam’s residual kinetic energy is longer, and the horizontal position more uncertain, both diameters should increase as you move out. let’s make the 2nd one twice the diameters of the first, and the third one twice again. like the bell of a horn.

oh, and there’s no wire running through the centre of each coil. (that region is reserved for magnetic field storage).

I’ve been studying how to make high-frequency, high-current coils, and have concluded that at the necessary frequencies, skin effect of the coil conductors comes into play. At 1GHz, skin depth is 2µm, and AWG-0 copper wire has an effective resistance of 318 ohms/m, much too great for a high Q coil. so instead of solid wires, they’d be either hollow pipes or pressed flat, like a Slinky toy. I’ve been told that a strip line, with thickness less than twice the skin-depth, will not suffer from skin effect. Geometry constraints then lead this to look like the conductor is occupying the space in-between the pieces of a shrimp plate. hope that’s clear. it might be necessary to reduce the inter-loop capacitance, or find a good way to take advantage of that.

Based on inductance calculations, the first coil might have as few as five turns; each additional coil would double that

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I still think they’re picking up ultra-low frequency EM radiation. Not enough that you could power a car, mind you; just enough to show that there is a signal… say, in ~ 7.5 to 15 Hz range, and harmonics. With good antenna and a high Q resonator, you should be able to get a few microwatts — more than enough to register on an oscilloscope.

Such radiation could originate from ionospheric interactions of solar wind and earth’s magnetic field.

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$400 doesn’t really get you the rights to anything other than a limited licence to use the product for a year; it’s proprietary, all the way down to a dongle on the board.

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jamesr wrote: Here’s an image of what I reckon it should look like (photo is actually of a lightbulb filament)

i think these will be separate segments, because the ions will be slowing down as they travel through

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benf wrote: I see what you mean, Vansig. I’ve looked it up in Wikipedia. The problem for me is adjusting the coil (paths) manually to make it circular will be very difficult. I can key in a math formula in the 3D program I’m using, which I’ve never done before. I’m searching the web for the handy formula that will just generate the correct coil, but haven’t found it yet.

ok.
let the toroid’s major diameter = D, and its minor diameter = d;
let the object’s centre be at (0,0,0);
trace a virtual path, P, having velocity W radians/s around the centre, at radius D/2,
such that at time t,
P(t) is a cartesian-coordinate point, whose value is the ordered triple, ( D·cos(Wt)/2, D·sin(Wt)/2, 0 );
this is a reference circle.

Trace a solid path Q, having velocity w radians/s around P, such that at time t,
Q(t) = ( D·cos(Wt)/2 + d·cos(Wt)·cos(wt)/2, D·sin(Wt)/2 + d·sin(Wt)·cos(wt)/2, d·sin(wt)/2 ).

i haven’t tested this, but i think it will do.

[vansig]

this looks to me like a magnetics simulation lab. but, if it’s reporting over-unity, then there’s something screwy.

do you suppose they’re deriving energy from natural low-frequency em fields or something like that?

[vansig]

refresh my memory. if black holes cannot exist,
what halts the collapse of a massive object, > 4 M[Sol]?

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Tulse wrote:
If you will permit one small nitpick, it appears that the plasma casts shadows on the “ground”.

Very illustrative. good job.

small nit pick:
the near end of the coil isnt connected to anything. also, imagine it will be Rogowski configuration, so toroidal, and squat and fat

Attached files

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dennisp wrote:
I’m not sure you guys are talking about the same thing on FF efficiency either. Eg., laser fusion requires a steam cycle, so call it 50% efficient at recovering the output. But there’s also the power required to fire the laser. FF has a substantial power input as well.

50% system efficiency was the figure Eric gave.

it should be reasonable to expect conversion efficiency of the exit beam to be similar to a high-voltage transformer. Those are usually >90%. even if you consume all of that for FF’s power input, you can recover a substantial amount of heat for running a steam cycle.

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cheaper, yes. but, safer? i really doubt that

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DerekShannon wrote:
It actually is possible in a small fraction of pB11 reactions for the energy to be released as a gamma ray instead of in the break-up into alpha particles, and when that happens you are indeed left with a carbon-12. A friend in astrophysics at Caltech suggested it might be interesting to look for the gamma ray signature as part of our diagnostics.

does the probability of a gamma change with the velocity of the collision? if so, it becomes a way to measure reaction temperature.

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MTd2 wrote: 10 thousand tones of Boron = 10^10g

10^10g has 6×10^23×10^10×10^-1 = 6×10^32 atoms of boron, since 1 mol of boron has aprox. 10g

An atom of boron yields 8MeV, so, the total output is 4.8×10^40eV. In joules, it would give 8*10^21J

The net output of that is around 10%, for commercial use, so, it means 10^21J, aprox.

The total consumption of energy of the world is 35TW or 3.5*10^13W which means 10^22J every year. To match this production, around 100thousand tones every of boron should be used.

The known commercial reserves of borate BO3(-3) are 10 milllion tons, which gives at best 1 – 2millions tons of pure boron.

So, we would have, at the very best, 20 years to finish all boron.

I hope I am wrong…

yes. here are two problems with your calculation. one is:

35 TW = 35 x 10^12 J/s;
x 86400 s/day x 365.25 days/year = 1.1 x 10^21 J, only. ( one tenth of your number. )

and the second problem is that the figure of 35 TW is bonkers.

EIA projection for future electricity demand is ” 25.0 trillion kilowatthours in 2020 and 35.2 trillion kilowatthours in 2035.”
— http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/highlights.html

1 kW h = 3.6 MJ

x 25.0 x10^12 = 9 x 10^19 J per annum in 2020;

and 1.267 x 10^20 J per annum in 2035.

that’s now on the order of a hundredth of your number. please check your facts and reference sources.

third, please use a system efficiency of 50%, which is approximately the number we’d get if we used steam turbines to recover the energy.

and finally, consider co-generation as a possible use. waste heat, that’s marginal for steam, is still pretty good for bathing. these generators will be small, and serve the needs of local communities.. like individual buildings in New York City, for example.

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