Slightly OT question on high voltages and electric arcs...

[Sven Andersson]

Might as well come clear about what I'm trying to achieve; I want to create a cold and dense deuterium plasma (completely dissociated) and at the same time expose that plasma to a powerful electric field. This has nothing to do with how a Fusor operates, but since people here have a knowledge of stuff like this I give it a go and ask.

Anyway, a setup I have been thinking about is the one shown in the schematic picture below. Take a glass tube (or is some other material better?) and put two tungsten electrodes inside (this tube is filled with deuterium gas at a suitable pressure) and create an arc in the usual way and then have two plates parallel to this tube so to speak, and apply a (say 20 kV) voltage across.

Would this work? The arc is not electrically neutral so it may be displaced in one direction or the other. Of course there are safety concerns with this kind of experiment, but if one isolates the whole setup and touches the controls for the electric arc with long plastic rods, and also puts the whole shebang inside a Faraday's cage, one should be safe. Or?

[Dennis P Brown]

I'm a bit worried by your statement about needing a Faraday cage. What purpose will that do to protect you? Blast shield designed to handle worse case detonation is more needed and issues of removing all oxygen would be absolutely critical.

Working deuterium at high pressure is basically risking a major explosion when it is ignited.

By the way, Researchers have been doing this type of approach for many years with poor results - see the Z-machine; further, when they set off their deuterium it blows up their apparatus and the end results are equivalent to a small hand grenade for each section. I've seen the pictures and they are not something I'd want to be anywhere near. And they know what they are doing.

These issues are exactly why people find it nearly impossible to buy small lecture bottles of deuterium gas. Lets not make it worse by proposing experiments that can become literal bombs.