Archived - Longwood Fusor Progress (long load time)

[argrzank]

We've been at it for just over two months and made a lot of progress. Here are some pictures of what we have accomplished as of July 5th-ish.

Picture 1- We ended up without a key transition from CF450 to ASA/ANSI Lightweight 2. So to gain invaluable machine shop experience my advisor thought we should make it ourselves, of course with the help of the welding shop down the street. This is a 15.5" outer casing of a hydraulic lift (we think) of SS304.

2-This is the University's lathe that we made it on.

3-The ID is completed and this is the OD being taken down to it's finishing cut.

4-This is a Water/Refrigerant/Liquid Nitrogen cooled baffle that will sit on top of the diffusion pump. It took me roughly 7 acetone/alcohol washes before it was clean.

5-Diffusion pump fully disassembled. It is a CVC 2-Inch Blueline Pump, type PMCS-2B. We found it in the old science building attached to a cart.

6-The Ion Gauge reads vacuum between 10^-9 - 10^-5 Torr.

7-Foreline trap

8-Our two rough pumps to choose from. Left; Varian DS102. Right; BOC Edwards 2-Stage. (We have just recently acquired an newer, more powerful rough pump for which I do not have an image)

9-1956 Geiger Counter

10-The chamber, 6 CF450's and 8 CF133's. (PRICEY!!!)

11-Horrible picture, but this is our convectron gauge, 10^-4 Torr- 5 atm.

12-TC gauge and controller

13-Electrical feedthrough, 30kV @ 55 Amp.

14-Diffusion pump oil, 100cc for $200.

15-Ion gauge and convectron gauge controller

16-Eberline ESP-1 Neutron Detector with 12" ball.

17-Centering the ASA/ANSI LTWT.-2 Flange we couldn't buy on the mill.

18-The mill

19-Drilling and tapping holes on the flange

20-Getting ready to make the two aluminum stock bars to hold our system on the cart

21-The cart being chopped up

22-Boring

23-Perfect fit

24-The flange we made is in between the gate vavle and baffle

25-This chiller can take refrigerant down to -30 degrees celsius. There's one upstairs we were going to use that goes down to -100 degrees but we thought that would be overkill.

26-The chemical wash station where I cleaned all of the components

27-It's a jungle, but it pulls a pretty good vacuum.

28-This is a temporary setup because we're waiting on six pack of bolts/nuts/washers because we ordered the wrong ones.

29-The ion gauge in action.

As of July 6th, the best vacuum we have reached was 5.10 x 10^-6. We have not baked out the system.

[Mike Beauford]

Wow! You guys are really making headway there. Keep up the great work.

[Starfire]

Andrew - may I suggest you down-size the photo's to 640 x 480 before posting - large files can take forever to download across the pond.
A good package to down-size is Lview - a free trail may be downloaded

http://www.lview.com

[Richard Hull]

Really super work and very well done, too.

We look forward to a run report on the system.

I will second John's suggestion. I am on a T1 line at work and this massive number of images of rather massive size each, took 3-4 minutes to load!!!

I am sure that any one on a dial up would need about 1.5 hours to down load these images. The general rule is no more than five images in a post and no more than 100K per image. 640X480 works out incredibly well. Lots of detail and fast loading.

I have done a single exposition spread over several posts where I needed to cover Fusor IV's construction in 20 photos.

Thanks for the fine gallery of images.

Richard Hull

[argrzank]

Yeah, I'm sorry. I thought about this and tried searching "FAQ" in this thread but couldn't find it. I guess I should have read the descripton first telling me where to find the "rules" about the images du jour. I'll fix all the photos and post some new ones; we're so far ahead of schedule we might be running a plasma within two-to-three weeks.

Whoops,
Andrew

[Nanos]

Perhaps someone could do some work on the forum software so it only shows a small low bandwidth thumbnail, that way everyones happy, including those of us who like a high resolution picture to make out the finer details.

[argrzank]

Still working hard, we managed to get argon and deuterium plasmas running and the information on those are in the announcements section.

Here are some more pictures for you to enjoy:
1- Image of SimIon potential array
2- Image of ion paths in simulation
3- ""
4- ""
5- Picture of argon plasma from a couple months ago

I have some more pictures on another computer that I will post later today. Those show our finished cart assembly, monitoring and control panel with lcd meters, and power supply. Our power supply had some trouble on the second day it was turned on. The first day we had taken it to it's maximum output for intervals of more than 5 minutes. The second day it was at less than 25% of its max and it blew. It's being sent back as I type this. More later...


Fuse on,
Andrew G

[Richard Hull]

Andrew thanks for keeping the post updated with new images.

You have shown a glow of plasma and, as such, are up for the plasma club membership. How would you have me enter it?.... Under a group/school name or just under yours?

Nice work, continue to keep us informed.

Richard Hull

[DaveC]

Andrew - Your construction is moving forward, and looking very nice. I like your Simion runs. Just a suggestion the show the details: use a higher Ion Bench resolution ( like 6 -8), to help see the details when you print out a run.

Are the ion sources located just inside the chamber edge? Also, what potentials did you use?

Nice work... keep up the progress.

Dave Cooper

[argrzank]

Thanks. Actually those are a 9 quality resolution, I think it just got like that from exporting to jpegs. We actually don't have an ion source in the simulation or in physical reality. The Ions are randomly distributed in a spherical distribution. Those screen shots are with the inner grid set at -20 kV. Our power supply is a 20 kV @ 18.5 mA max, spellman I believe.

The picture of argon plasma was, I'm guessing here, ~1.5 kV @ 1 mA, maybe say 20 microns.

I'd be more than happy to post the .gem files if anyone would like them.

Andrew G

[Jon Rosenstiel]

I concur with the others Andrew, very nice work.

Try exporting Simion to GIF format, I should look a little better.

Jon Rosenstiel