Aidan Roy - My Fusor Progress

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Aidan_Roy
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Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2020 10:08 am
Real name: Aidan Roy
Location: Massachusetts

Re: Aidan Roy - My Fusor Progress

Post by Aidan_Roy »

Hi again everyone,

This is yet another fairly small update. The biggest news is the near completion of my xrt stuff, I have it all under oil and tested successfully to around 30 kv, disconnected from the fusor chamber. The current metering is yet to be set up but all is in place for me just to wire it in. Furthermore, I finished the second wiring of serial communication to my other mks gauge. I have almost finished plumbing the gas handling line as well. My NIM bin is ready to go but the recent excessive cold has kept me from doing much with that. Additionally, I switched out the 1/4” copper tube that was in my feedthrough for an 1/8” stainless one. This gives more clearance inside the tube between the wall and electrical contact. I also epoxied in a washer to keep everything well centered. Sadly I haven’t got any pictures to show today but I will soon have a follow up with pictures of some nice plasma and my HV control and monitoring board.

Best regards,
Aidan
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Mark Rowley
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Re: Aidan Roy - My Fusor Progress

Post by Mark Rowley »

Sounds like just a matter of time before you fire it up. Keep at it and you’ll be making neuts soon!

Mark Rowley
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Aidan_Roy
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Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2020 10:08 am
Real name: Aidan Roy
Location: Massachusetts

Re: Aidan Roy - My Fusor Progress

Post by Aidan_Roy »

Hi all,

Sorry for the absence of pictures that were promised last week. After connecting to the chamber, I started having "issues" with the GFCI in my garage. I do say issues very loosely because it was actually just doing its job and I failed to realize that I was drawing too much current and just popping the fuse. I was late to realize because I had thought that it was on a 25 or 30 amp fuse and knew that much was not being drawn. I initially had my HV line and wall line very close and assumed it was inducing a current in the line that tripped the fault detector. After I got my cable management figured out, I still had issues and figured it was something being too close to something else inside the oil filled case of the transformer and so I worked that angle and also improved a bit on the neatness of that, but still to no avail. Finally I decided to really check out the fuse it was on and discovered that it was a 15. Needless to say, having almost a dozen things plugged into an outlet or two on a single fuse doesn't work out.

After that delightful oversight, I decided to improve on my wiring for the serial connection to the vacuum gauges and turned more focus to the neutron detection effort. I got a 6 inch stove pipe and that is now filled with paraffin and will be my moderator for the SI-19N He3 tube I am using. Finally, I got back to the fun stuff only to discover that the cheap camera I am using to watch the grid is excessively sensitive to IR and would get completely overexposed at very low energies applied to the grid even with the digital exposure turned all the way down. Luckily I had some leftover solar film that was perfect for blocking a huge portion of the light reaching the camera. It is basically opaque to visible light so you can really only see the grid through the IR. This is good for operation but bad for pretty pictures. I solved this by removing the lenses from some cheap plastic sunglasses. The color accuracy is lost if both are overlapped but is decently preserved when only one is used. The trade off is the voltage that can be applied before details are lost to the light.

Below are a few pictures of the plasma I ignited earlier today as well as the control/electronics housing rack I assembled.
Attachments
NIM and Transformer metering with control.jpg
About 33kv at 20 microns viewed through solar film and output of gauges.PNG
About 14 kv at 9 microns.PNG
About 14 kv at 9 microns.PNG (50.8 KiB) Viewed 5027 times
36kv, 10 microns.PNG
36kv, 10 microns.PNG (377.59 KiB) Viewed 5027 times
13 microns at 14.6kv.PNG
13 microns at 14.6kv.PNG (30.56 KiB) Viewed 5027 times
12 kv at 12 microns.PNG
12 kv at 12 microns.PNG (135.77 KiB) Viewed 5027 times
3.6kv at 15 microns, viewed through lenses.PNG
3.6kv at 15 microns, viewed through lenses.PNG (82.75 KiB) Viewed 5027 times
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Richard Hull
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Re: Aidan Roy - My Fusor Progress

Post by Richard Hull »

Aidan, thanks for the fine display and data. You are now in the Plasma club.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Aidan_Roy
Posts: 80
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2020 10:08 am
Real name: Aidan Roy
Location: Massachusetts

Re: Aidan Roy - My Fusor Progress

Post by Aidan_Roy »

Thanks Richard. I still need to work on cooling the chamber and maybe making the wire diameter on the grid larger. I can push the voltage up to about 50 kv with no arcing issues but the wire gets white hot around 36. For cooling I have an old aloha breeze floor fan that moves about 5000 CFM placed roughly 4 feet away from the chamber. Unless I run at lower than average pressure for the size of my chamber, I am not sure how long I will be able to sustain voltages conducive to decent levels of easily detectable fusion. I'm thinking of using 0.032" or 0.05" wire as opposed to my current 0.02" wire for the grid.

Aidan Roy
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Richard Hull
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Re: Aidan Roy - My Fusor Progress

Post by Richard Hull »

Keep plugin' you'll get there.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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