Light metal coated ball fusor

[Calmarius]

Today as I read about polywells and fusor, an idea come into mind:

As far as I know the fusor is an ineffective fusion reactor due to the conduction losses: ions hitting the grid instead of skipping it and fuse at the center.
So what about turning disadvantage into our advantage:

So instead of grid you can use a hollow ball conductor, with cooling system inside, and then you coat this ball with a thick layer of light metals like lithium or boron or any solid fusion fuel.

Then make hard vacuum in the chamber (maybe 1e-8 torr like the one for polywells), charge up the conductor ball to the right voltage and inject ions. The ions should fall down the potential well and smash into metal coating maybe fusing into it, releasing energy.

I thought of lithium and boron, because their reactions are aneutronic (but anything else ok I think):

lithium6 + deuterium => 2*He4 + 22.4 MeV aneutronic
proton + boron11 => 3*He4 + 8.7 MeV aneutronic

(It was in Wikipedia, I didn't verified it)

My thoughts about this:
- Since the conductor and the coating is negatively charged, my intuition suggests the Coulomb barrier is smaller as the ion is not repelled till it enters into the atom, maybe even attracted by the atom's electron cloud when it's nearby. Or maybe just the opposite?
- If the ion bounces back it may try again.
- Will the ions bounce back or more likely stop inside the metal? Or would they pass right through it? How much erosion would it cause?
- These reactions may need very high potentials. The p-B11 reaction requires 500kV for optimal cross section, but it have a weird peak at 150kV too.
- Is it possible to charge up the inner grid to such high voltages at all? Wouldn't it start bleeding electrons?

I haven't found anything about this on web so far; maybe this idea is so flawed that it doesn't even worth a try?

[Andrew Haynes]

Hi Calmarius

500kv is do-able if you can get the stand off or insulation ,at high temperature 3000K at lower voltage 10-30kv will do that (themoic), bleed off electrons, going by personal theory the proton would scatter electrons, unless the right place at the right time and right speed(kev-mev) to probabilistic or design of orbits miss the orbiting electron/s, the neutron should have the same effect if it gets closer enough to the inner shell.
To workout if they will bounce/go deep you would have to model it, with cautous(random theory spelling) removed, assume a force field container with gravity measuring tools, and will only be accurate for one collision, as that will effect the next collision orbits and atom atom interaction.
About a sphere that is complete it shouldn't have a potential well, unless you could have plasma inside and a mag field to aline the charges to create instability , maybe a pinhole laser hole, could be used, or high frequency say 2.4ghz with a dialectic inside for the same instability

[Bruce Meagher]

What you appear to describe is a simple beam on target configuration stuffed into a fusor like mechanical structure. You might ask yourself what are the advantages and disadvantages of your configuration compared to any other beam on target system.

[Calmarius]

Okay. I see.

So this basically means beam on target is a totally infeasible way to do fusion, even worse than a fusor...

If it has had been so simple, then our world would have run on fusion power plants...

[JakeJHecla]

Your idea sounds a bit like one of Dr. Leung's projects. Search IB-1675 on this page. http://www.lbl.gov/tt/techs/lbnl1764.html

[Bruce Meagher]

Beam on target is a fabulous way to generate fusion events (not net power). If you’re going to build what you propose why would you choose this design? How would your ion source focus on the spherical target? I would claim the ion source in Jake’s link article would be challenging to build for even a seasoned professional with lots of resources.

[Richard Hull]

The fuels you propose would demand huge voltages far beyond anyhting the amateur could muster. Lots of things are theoretically possible and even doable, but the amateur is aced out of this proposed scenario.

Obviously, even if the pro's did this it would never produce any real fusion energy. It would just be another beam on target fusion machine, gobbling energy 8 or 9 orders of magnitude beyond that which it produces.

Richard Hull