Archived - Plasma Achieved

[honickmonster]

Yesterday I achieved plasma in my fusor. My fusor is composed of an aluminum baseplate, a 6" pyrex bell jar, a welch 1400 2 stage rotary vane vacuum pump, a varian 531 thermocouple gauge, a varian 801 readout module, and a microwave oven transformer and diode, and a variac.

For all the pictures the voltage was 2 KV and the pressure was about 30 microns.

One thing i noticed is that even at 3 KV I can pump down to extinction and not see any signs of star mode. All I see is a electron beam and then that goes out, and the plasma just disappears. Do I need higher voltages or is my chamber not clean enough.

[Richard Hull]

Your do need more voltage and you probably aren't as clean as you might be, as well. However, at high voltages you willl glow clean your chamber considerably.

Star mode is most often best seen at about 10-14kv and a pressure of 6-15 microns. it heralds nothing but a very clean chamber and good vacuum technique. But, it is pretty.

I have added you to the plasma club and archived this major milestone in this forum.

Observation:

I notice your images are massively memory intensive and are probably very large. They are also rather fuzzy.

I would rather see a 230X400 image of 48kbytes that was razor sharp than a 2380X3600 image of 3.7 megabytes that looks like a woolen rug.

In future try down sizing your images to about 400X680 or so and they will load a lot faster. Can you manually focus? The bell jar will screw an auto focus camera to the level of it aughta' focus but it don't.

Richard Hull