New Home for Doug's Fusor

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Richard Hull
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Richard Hull »

Great points Jim! You tend to back up my activation presentation above. Net Zero thermal flux during the Gonzo mode making all normal activation statistics null and void. Any attempts at recreation of the claimed event are equivalent to a snipe hunt, in my mind. Like Farnsworth, Doug is gone. Legends and tales of amazing claims live long afterwards.

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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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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Jon Rosenstiel »

I seem to recall that what became activated were steel wrenches and lathe tool bits containing some small amount of cobalt. (Cobalt-steel)

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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by billwcf »

So I wasn't there during Doug's , I will say "claimed" to appease everyone, run. I thank God I wasn't. I too only know what Doug told me. He said he was tweaking knobs etc, and suddenly heard a searing, white noise type of sound coming from the from the speakers. He had attached an audio amp and speakers to the output of the neutron tube so he could "hear" the relative neutron output from the He3 tube. He learned of this Idea from Richard. He said all of his equipment was "flooded" or maybe shutdown, can't remember precisely. During a normal run the audio sounded like heavy rain on a tin roof. He immediately couldn't figure out what was wrong. I can understand that as I have a radiac set I purchased from Richard that I run to listen to cosmics. I came home one day after a tec99 heart scan and heard a searing screaming sound. I immediately couldn't understand what was going on either, until I realized it was "Me" causing the screaming.
Doug was immediately bed ridden after the "accident" with vomiting and diarrhea for about two weeks. A curious scientist would speculate a cause and effect relationship between the events. Additionally, Doug never got a cold or anything during the time I knew him. I suspect his close relationship with microbes helped out his immune system as he wasn't really good at hygiene, so the i discounted the idea that he may have had the flu or something after the event. I always took my own food and drink to Doug's and would sometimes come home looking like a "coal miner" after crawling around some of the equipment or running wires underneath etc.
I had come upon a "stash" of Woods metal that melts at 158 degrees. We used it to "shield" a lot of stuff around the fusor because it was so easy to cast. After the event I had it analyzed at a scrap yard. It contained about 10 per cent cadmium. Doug looked up the neutron data on cadmium and realized it gives of a 9mv gamma from neutron capture. Doug thought and probably rightly so that the cadmium helped "cook" him. I think in a discussion with Richard, Richard had stated that he thought Doug had had excessive xray exposure. We immediately removed all the woods metal.
I was up at Doug's about two weeks after the "event" I scanned the room with my survey meter and found no excessively high background. Doug never lost his hair that I knew of.
I have no doubt that "something" happened with the fusor to make Doug sick. His close neighbor confirmed Doug was "really sick" for about two weeks. His neighbor is an EMT. I believe the fusor got into some sort of positive feedback mode and pumped out an incredible amount of neutrons and gamma rays, how many, no one knows.
Yes, there are no "pictures or it didn't happen" data to go with this, only Doug's account and what Doug told me. So I will leave it up to you to think what you think.
Bill
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Jim Kovalchick »

Bill,
I believe that something happened though I'm not sure the activation story makes sense.

I have seen ridiculous short transient neutron numbers on my fusor. With my current BF3 tube that usually reads 20 kcpm at 45 kV and 10 mA, I have seen the needle spike to the end of scale at 500 with a 1k multiplier on my ludlum 2200. I am not sure if it was real or noise because the transients last only a few seconds. They have been coincident with reaching a high shell temperature. So, one theory is that the shell released a bunch of D all at once. I saw Richard's fusor have similar neutron transients last October at HEAS.

Maybe that's what Doug saw.

Jim K
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Richard Hull
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Richard Hull »

Again, Bill gives us more good info on Doug and the event. Bill was about as close to Doug in a scientific sense as anyone around him as a regular in-person helper/assistant. I some times see Bill at hamfests and we chat a bit. He is often at the HEAS October events and has even showed up here on his own for a short visit.

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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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Mark Rowley »

Jim,
I’ve had the same brief spikes with a very similar neutron detection arrangement (Ludlum 2221 / CHM11 and CHM14 detector tubes). Luckily, I’ve experienced the condition several times while using a bubble detector. At no time did they reflect any increase in neutron production. I still contend the anomaly is either an electron runaway effect near the grid stalk causing electrical noise interference OR some type of high tension corona issue causing similar results. Fwiw, I’ve only noticed these brief occurrences while operating above 45kV. It was also more prevalent in the small cross fusor than the larger one I’m currently operating.

Bill, what do you mean by “positive feedback mode”?

Side note…
I know this whole thing is sensitive topic however, since Dougs fusor is being rebuilt with Gonzo Mode as the end goal, it’s important to highlight what he (Doug) had previously defined as “Gonzo Mode” in the old posts. That definition is the criteria that has to be met for successful replication.

With that being said, it does not undermine the astute technological advances Doug incorporated with his system. There have been quite a few highly respected folks observe his fusor churning out some phenomenal numbers. Numbers that, in my opinion, are not obtainable with the classic design. Undoubtedly we all can learn a lot from his advances.

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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by billwcf »

By positive feedback I meant Doug's fusor was basically a triode set up as an oscillator. -bill
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Jim Kovalchick »

Mark,
I'm not using a Russian tube anymore, but the phenomenon could still be noise.

Jim
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Bob Reite »

To Joe Gayo and others: The theoretical discussion of operating a fusor as an electronic oscillator and how "Gonzo Mode" might work is under another topic titled "Fusor as an oscillator, a serious discussion". I will continue to use this topic to post the reassembly progress and operational results obtained once put back together.
The more reactive the materials, the more spectacular the failures.
The testing isn't over until the prototype is destroyed.
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Richard Hull
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Richard Hull »

Thanks Bob! I was getting ready to suggest that....Yo beat me to it. Definitely let this thread be about the re-assembly and testing of Doug's fusor with plenty of images as you get time to take photos of your progress. I am interested enough in what Doug claimed, and built his theories around, to feel it deserves the attention that we might give it in discussion and perhaps experiment. the serious discussion can be picked up at......

viewtopic.php?f=50&t=14021

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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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Bob Reite »

I now have all the mechanical and vacuum aspects reassembled and the fusor is now under vacuum. I really like the intermittent backing pump set up. It turns out that Pfeifffer designed this system to operate this way. In any case, the pix please!
fusor_front.jpg
fusor_rear.jpg
fusor_pressure.jpg
For those who are used to Torr, the reading on the display translates to 5.6 E-6. Darn good considering it's only been an hour and no bake out.

Next steps reconnect high voltage supplies, coils and ballast resistors and remote control system.
The more reactive the materials, the more spectacular the failures.
The testing isn't over until the prototype is destroyed.
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Richard Hull
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Richard Hull »

Fabulous work on this important restoration to functioning condition. Great pix and keep the reports on your effort coming.

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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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Ameen Aydan »

I just wanted to jump in here,

I was talking to Doug about his feed through design a while back, trying to come up with some inspiration to make my own. After that conversation was over, he was quick to mention this "Gonzo" mode of his. Similar to what Bill had mentioned, Doug said that we was bed ridden for weeks and was incredibly sick after the event. It was a long time ago, but I do remember him mentioning something about a similarity between this event and mass spectrometers? One of you can make the connection LOL.

Anyways, he said that he reached the trillion neutron mark. So, hope that help...

AA
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Bob Reite »

Update: I got the power supplies and the remote control electronics reinstalled. One of my ham radio buddies came up to visit so that we could do the Murgas hamfest. He also helped me run the fiber optic and 12 pair direct burial phone cable between the fusor shed and the office. I am now where I was when I bench tested the remote control system. I can see the grid cam, admit gas (currently air) into the chamber and read the pressure "after the fact". Haven't found where the code is buried to display pressure, voltage and current in real time. Anyway, pix below:
electronics.jpg
Electronics installed.
gridcam.jpg
Grid Cam, with quartz bulb illumination.
The more reactive the materials, the more spectacular the failures.
The testing isn't over until the prototype is destroyed.
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by John Futter »

Excellent Bob
Is the quartz bulb what Doug had in there for degassing??

Its been a while since I saw it
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Bob Reite »

Yes, the quartz bulbs are for baking out. The pressure is down to 6.0 x 10-7 millibar. About as low as you can get with the Viton gaskets used in some places and more than enough for fusor work.
The more reactive the materials, the more spectacular the failures.
The testing isn't over until the prototype is destroyed.
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Bob Reite »

Power supply high voltage side now connected as well as the controls. Because of the limited resolution of the digital control of the ion grid, I went to an old school pot to send 0-10 volts down one of the control cable pairs to the ion supply. Doug originally left the main grid supply preset, there was no provision for remote control of that, so I set it for 50 KV with 10 mA current limit to keep the grid dissipation at 500 watts or less.
hv_connected.jpg
HV connected and ready to go, with at least some of the components for "Gonzo mode".
run_with_air.jpg
A shot from the remote control station. Grid cam shows both the main and ion grids glowing.

Next step is to hook up the audio, so I can hear the REM ball clicking which will be installed next.

After that hook up the D2, put the neutron oven in place with silver foil and a pancake probe.

Then try some runs in Farnsworth mode, but with ion grid which will keep things "lit up" at lower pressures.
The more reactive the materials, the more spectacular the failures.
The testing isn't over until the prototype is destroyed.
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Peter Schmelcher »

Bob, I liked Doug’s backing pump solution but always worried about spinning a turbo continuously because ball bearings/lubricants have a lifetime and also his system was ultimately solar powered. My setup uses an ion pump running 24-7. I cobbled together a 3.5kV supply and by using two diodes and 4 AA batteries it is back up for over a day during a rare electrical outage. I occasionally monitor the vacuum by glancing at a 100uA full scale mechanical meter movement wired in the return current path of the pump’s high voltage supply. Full scale is a pressure of 0.9uTorr for the version of ion pump I have and at that pressure it would consume 350mW but lower pressure requires less power. Eventually the pump saturates with hydrogen (the meter slowly climbs slowly over a year or longer from 18uA to 100uA) and a pump bake out is required to rejuvenate and restore the pressure the ion pumped chamber reaches.

My take is that the ultimate pressure of the vacuum chamber are unknown gases (well probably hydrogen) just complicating investigations. Just something to consider when looking for a needle in a haystack.

Very glad Doug’s setup has a good home.
-Peter
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Richard Hull »

Remember the old motto.......Once you get it running..........Tune for minimum smoke.

Great effort Bob. I would not want to undertake such a reassembly effort.

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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My Visit with Doug

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

Serves me right for being "in the void" for the past year+, but I have only this moment learned of Doug Coulter's demise. I am reading through the "Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything" thread on his personal 'Coultersmithing' website which started in 2018:

http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/v ... =42&t=1083

...and gets into his health travails in the last few pages.

I visited with Doug not long after the "Gonzo" event. If you missed that account, I posted the tale here:

http://waterstarproject.com/doug-coulte ... -in-a-jar/

I dare say there are some good photos...

--P
Paul Schatzkin, aka "The Perfesser" – Founder and Host of Fusor.net
Author of The Boy Who Invented Television: 2023 Edition – https://amz.run/6ag1
"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
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Bob Reite
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Bob Reite »

I now have neutrons! A lot of them! Some pictures, and a report.
gas_connected.jpg
D2 tank and regulator are now connected. The readout for the REM ball is now in place and connected.
moderator.jpg
What you are seeing from top to bottom of the moderator or "neutron oven"
Very top is a block of HDPE
Below that, the aluminum item is the pancake probe in a rectangular case
If one looks carefully, one can see the silver foil between the pancake probe and the copper box which contains water as a moderator.
I did not fill it full for two reasons. One, there is a slight leak at a top joint and two, if the water does get to boiling I want a bit of head space
rather than rely on the vent stack alone. However, this may spoil the effectiveness of this part of the moderator as there is a 3/4 air gap between the
top of the water and the top of the copper box.

The output from the geiger counter is wired to an ardunio input and to the audio mixer. The output from the audio mixer goes to the audio amp and speakers at the control point.

Now the results of the first run with gas. I started out with the chamber at around 1 x 10-4 bar. Switched on the main grid supply to 50 KV with a 10 mA current limit set. Switched on the ion grid supply, set it to about 15 KV more or less. At this pressure there is no current draw and the image on the grid cam is dark.
This fusor is run in "batch mode", rather than continuously flowing gas as is more common with other fusors. There is a button on the remote interface which pulses the gas inlet solenoid for 20 ms. There is another button which originally was set for 50 ms, but during the test with air, that was too short a time, s I changed it to operate for 100 ms per button press.
In any case I admitted gas a bit at a time until the glow discharge started. At first the glow would go out as the turbo continued to pump, but eventually an equilibrium is reached at which the gas pressure is more steady and I can control the current draw of the main grid supply by adjusting the ion grid voltage. As Bill warned me, it is very touchy, so I'm glad that I had changed the control over to an "old school" analog pot. By looking at the REM ball display and listening to the clicks I could adjust for maximum output. As would be expected by theory, maximum output is obtained at 50 KV and 10 mA. If there is too much gas, the power supply goes into current limit mode, the voltage drops and the neutron output drops along with it. So I would ride the ion grid voltage control to keep the supply at 50 KV. It was better to have a little less pressure or ion grid voltage and let the main grid current drop as low as 7-8 mA rather than have it go into current limit and lose voltage. When the fusor was doing it's best there would be "sparklies" in the grid cam view. I'm guessing probably from X rays.
REM_ball_reading.jpg
Here is the maximum value of 573 mRem per hour obtained during this roughly 10 minute run, at about 4 minutes in. The average never dropped below 60 mRem per hour during most of the operation,
Based on a distance of 32.5 cm between the center of the REM ball and the center of the main grid, this calculates to 5.92 e7 n/s isotropic. That's 59,200,000! Not as high as the "Gonzo Mode" claim but significant

Trying to go beyond 10 minutes was a struggle. As I have witnessed watching Richard operate his fusor, it reached a point where it wanted to go into what must be thermal runaway. The supply current limit avoided damage, but neuron generation ceased once the main grid HV had collapsed below 12 KV. I was able to bring it back for a bit by repeatedly releasing gas. Back up at 50 KV, neutron production started again, but it reached a point where the gas release button could not keep up with the pressure rise.

To make sure that the REM ball electronics was not picking up RFI, I did another run with the BF3 tube removed from the moderator ball. I achieved the same operation including sparklies in the grid cam view, but the REM Ball electronics only reported 0.5 mRem per hour, same as the background count with nothing running except the REM ball.

Silver activation proof proved to be elusive. The Rasperry Pi computer crashed so I could not record the pulses. I was able to hear the geiger counter after shutdown, and it did seem to register notably above background for a few minutes, but I'm not going to claim activation at this time. I will probably set up a computer back at the control point to count the clicks coming over the audio feed, so I don't have to rely on the Pi in the high RF environment. As mentioned above, I probably need to improve the "neutron oven" geometry.
The more reactive the materials, the more spectacular the failures.
The testing isn't over until the prototype is destroyed.
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Jim Kovalchick
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Jim Kovalchick »

Wow! Great report Bob. Super numbers, but I wonder if the batch design is holding it back.
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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Mark Rowley »

Exciting results! I'm sure you'll push the boundaries as far as the system allows. Looking forward to activation numbers!

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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Richard Hull »

At that supposed neutron level, 59 mega neuts/s, if you listened to the GM right at shutdown, even with a rotten moderator, the the GM would have been screaming like a bat out of hell. Even a minute or two afterward The GM wound be roaring. Is it just me or did none of the other activators here with even a modicum of experience not see the fallacy here??? Huge exposure and the GM seemed to be just audibly above background!?

Bob, run the thing again and hit just the 2 million n/s mark for only four minutes, immediately shut down the fusor and turn on the GM looking at the naked silver within under one minute or preferably, far less. If real a 2million run is honest, the silver should be really clicking away. no guess work or counting needed. Extreme rapidity of access of the silver to a working mica windowed GM is critical after shut down.

Precise timing following turn off and rapid reading tells the tale. Hit a peak and hold it for two to four minutes, shutdown and immediately read the silver.

No need hitting a peak at 5 minutes and 250mr/hr only to watch it whimp out at 12 minutes to near zero and then read the silver....It would be fully decayed by then. No need to wait for 500mr/hr. Just shut the pig down at 100mr/hr and read the silver. It should sound like a continuous tone with no distinct audible silence between counts at all. If you just hear obviously fast clicks, you have done activation, but then you never hit the 2 million n/s mark, either.

Richard Hull
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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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Re: New Home for Doug's Fusor

Post by Bob Reite »

Indeed, yesterday's run seem to be in the "too good to be true" category. I have found that this fusor has a high peak to average ratio as measured by the REM ball. This mornings run peaked at 100,000,000 n/s! If this were true, it would break the all time record for Q, with only 600 watts input power. However the average reading was only 1,000,000 n/s, dropping to 800,000 n/s as the fusor got "tired" toward the end of the run, about what can be expected for a standard Farnsworth fusor operated at 50 KV and 10 mA. Needless to say, more tests need to be done to determine the cause of the high peak to average ratio, and to get the silver to activate to an obvious degree.
The more reactive the materials, the more spectacular the failures.
The testing isn't over until the prototype is destroyed.
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