Fusor Forums

Yes, that's very interesting. Now all you need are large, single crystal perfect diamonds, and something useful to do with reflected X rays, since of course the fusor medium won't even notice them much.
If there was something similar for neutrons -- that would be a real exciting situation.

Dan DT wrote:

> If you are talking about recovering the energy carried by the x-rays. That is simple. A simple thermal cycle can do this at up to ~ 30% efficiency. Efficiencies of up to ~ 80-90 % may be possible. Eric Lenear has a patent (or at least a patent application) for a possible method.

The latest materials to be released this year from scientific and university experiments has led to a 45% efficiency of thermal energy conversion. And we are not talking collecting thermal energy from the plasma but from the heating of the chamber from electrical discharge. You've all made comments about the chamber being "hot" to the touch and this could well be utilized to feed some energy loss back into the system.

As for the polywell's 6 torii, they don't cancel eachother out. The effect creates fields that "press" against one another with weak points in the torii centers and cubical corners where the fields either don't reach or aren't strong enough to contain. An additional 6 torii of slightly larger diameter would mean more field compression into a spherical shape, which in fact, you would want in an IEC fusor but not a polywell. The goal is to keep the energetic particles in a tight area to increase collisions.

Doug Coulter wrote:
> Yes, that's very interesting. Now all you need are large, single crystal perfect diamonds, and something useful to do with reflected X rays, since of course the fusor medium won't even notice them much.
> If there was something similar for neutrons -- that would be a real exciting situation.

Quartz crystals can be used for it's piezoelectric effects from x-rays and other vibratory/thermal exchanges to oscillate an electric current but the rapid radiation decay would mean changing out the crystals every 2-3 weeks and that wouldn't be cost effective so I don't consider that as of right now.

Lastly, a big reason for the x-ray shielding materials would be to create a safer work environment for the operators and not simply to attempt to reflect back into the core. New generations of optical camoflauge can be setup for specific particle wavelengths which could, in turn, reflect x-ray energy back but has not been tested yet.

Minimizing bleed-off energy and actually attempting energy reclamation is what the fusor is lacking in all experiments run. Very glad to see members looking up new materials and research for possible applications. Too much secular work is being done.

>Too much secular work is being done.

Huh? What does that mean?

>>Too much secular work is being done.
> Huh? What does that mean?

I guess it must mean we're not being 'religious' enough about the subject, and that we should do less of all this silly objective experimentation and trust blindly in the words of others.

Secular means secluded or separate, this is not limited to religion. The scientific community has run this way for a great many decades and is doing a movement towards cloud networking. The sharing of information between all scientists to see if even failed experiments towards a specific goal might be a successful one in another field.