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Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Thu May 27, 2021 6:21 pm
by JoeBallantyne
Assuming that the d+D2 graph at higher energies curves in a similar way to the h+D2 graph, and that they both fall as fast as they rise in the lower energy region, you could arguably say that the cross section might be as much as a factor of 10 smaller - 1*10e-16, which would make the MFP 10 times longer or on the order of 30cm or so. Most amateur fusors don't have chambers that big.

Joe.

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Thu May 27, 2021 6:29 pm
by Joe Gayo
Joe

You have to get to that point in the curve. I'm done arguing. I've shared all the necessary information to see what's happing.

I'm going back to work on my devices to make more neutrons.

Good luck.

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Thu May 27, 2021 8:06 pm
by Frank Sanns
We do not have to agree and I get it. I have been through the graphs and done the calculations. At the end of the day though, experimental evidence has to be considered as it is the real environment that we are working in.

To add some facts, essentially 100% off all electrons, at all of potentials within the operating fusor are lost to wall heating. They provide essentially zero ionizations. Any ionization that is done is essentially only by ions and fast neutral atoms and molecules.

The ionizations are made visible by the recombination of electrons and falling energy levels from previously ionized gas. This gives a clearly visible marker to where the ions are in the fusor.

I had been intrigued on how these long star trails do not stop at the outer grid (10 inches in my case) but pass on to the outer chamber, sometimes 4 inches past that. This cannot occur if an ion on the other side of the fusor is accelerated to to potential and then loses the potential on the way out. Conservation of energy says it can't go higher than the energy put in just like dropping a ball on the ground can't go any higher than the height from which it was dropped. However, every single day of operation, I see complete violation of this conservation law. The only answer is that there are tangential paths from a previous fall. Energy is maintained and the momentum vector changes direction for the next path. This residual energy is the only explanation for the longer exit paths than the entrance one.

The heat marks on the inside of all of our fusors are the result of these ions hitting the walls with significant residual energy and even enough to cause fusion pithing the wall itself. That energy cannot come from simply falling through a potential and losing that energy on the exit.

Here is a photo of the electrons origins and patterns on the wall of a temporary Pyrex spherical insulation within my fusor. Notice no visible plasma where the electrons are accelerated toward the walls, in this case and insulator that fluoresces in the electron beam. It is in the Images section under Tickling the Fusor Dragon.

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Thu May 27, 2021 11:21 pm
by JoeBallantyne
@Joe - My intention was not to argue, or be difficult. Simply to try to understand where you got the numbers you were plugging into your equations. I agree with you that the MFP is most likely on the order of cm or 10s of cm, not meters or 10s of meters for a fusor that is running at 5-15 microns (5*10e-3 torr). My understanding is that your fusor runs at MUCH lower pressures like 10e-5 torr. Which would mean that your MFP ought to be significantly higher.

@Frank - Assuming your fusor has a visible plasma ball in the center (Joe Gayo's does not as his pressures are much lower.) Then there will be at least some transfer of energy between ions in the plasma, and there will therefore be some percentage of the ions that actually end up with a higher speed than what you are driving the plasma with. ie: some of the ions will come out hotter than the hottest ions you are sending in. And they will smash into the walls and get lost. I don't know that anyone has proven exactly what kind of energy distribution there is in the plasma in the center of a typical fusor, but I suspect it may be more Maxwellian than most want to admit. In which case the tail of the distribution could have ions with energies higher than the ones you are driving the plasma with.

From what you are describing, that MUST be the case, as you said there are visible indications of activity outside your anode.

Joe.

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Sun May 30, 2021 6:49 am
by Dennis P Brown
While most power supplies are more Lorentzian in out put power, these also have tails; further, as I understand, any semi-sharp or sharp metal surface can and will create significantly higher potentials allowing a small number of electrons to accelerate well above the PS normal potential - this is often exploited with needle point discharges. Of course, the average of all power the supply can achieve is conserved.

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Sat Jul 08, 2023 5:24 pm
by Richard Hull
To restart the thought process here......The power supply is a major issue to limiting the energy available to any oscillator at any frequency. Ultra low impedance would seem to be the ticket. In any oscillator, the RC or LC time constant is critical to the frequency of oscillation. In a purely RC relaxation oscillator the capacitor is the item that determines the rate of oscillation assuming there is no actual resistor inserted short of the gas resistance and that of the power source.

As to the LC oscillatory rate just as in the pure RC case, there is now an RLC circuit. The R value will always limit the power available to the oscillator.

Think on this a bit.

Richard Hull

P.S. I did replace my original equivalent circuit lost in the last major issue of backup. All of Joe's diagrams and circuits are probably lost forever.

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2023 12:04 pm
by Frank Sanns
Rereading this thread, I may have inadvertently taken it off course a bit by discussing the dynamics of the plasma. Back to the original question of the electronic circuit as a whole.

It is important to point out that in the case of an unfiltered 60 hz power supply, like you are running Richard, the plasma will behaving like it is being entirely switched on and off. This is due to the long time period of the 60hz voltage swings compared to the relaxation time of the plasma itself. Of course once things are very hot and electrons are boiling off then the hot grid becomes the maintainer of the plasma and the 60 hz is superimposed on top of it.

This would be important because there are two separate circuits; the simple low temperature grid plasma/circuit one and then the more complicated red hot grid electron fueled plasma one.

The first case, of the low temperature grid one is the simpler of the two. Working backwards, the question might be, what would the circuit look like at as a function of pressure, voltage and current. We all know that answer as they are intimately related. However, there is a limit to the current at all times. Having a power supply capable of 50 full amps at 20kv is not going to dump all of that power into the plasma because of its own resistance. So running a monster power supply or big capacitors does not a mega watt pulsed Fusor make. There is also induction that will limit too as things complicate quickly.

In the hot grid mode, dumping 50 amps into the Fusor most likely will create a large catastrophic bang as electrons and boiled off metal from the inner grid will continue to build until something fails, i.e. grid melted, hole in outer shell with loss of vacuum, stalk melted off, etc..

The most complicated of the circuits will be the hybrid conditions that exist between the cold grid with well behaved plasma and the very hot grid where low resistance boiling off electrons and vaporizing conductive metal are the predominant modes.

Of course the best place to operate a Fusor with the highest neutron numbers are at the balance point between those two states.

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Mon Jul 10, 2023 2:42 pm
by Richard Hester
I actually found the short treatise I generated on using a thyratron to switch a PFN into a fusor via a step-up transformer lurking on my computer. The big problem I see in retrospect is matching the plasma to the impedance of the PFN through the pulse transformer. Some sort of ballasting impedance would likely be needed between the transformer output and the fusor plasma - a low-capacitance inductor of some sort may just be the ticket... If I remember correctly, the current levels were such that a humble 5C22 could work as the switch. This all assumes that the voltage across the plasma does not collapse with the higher current discharge into some sort of arc mode.

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Mon Jul 10, 2023 7:47 pm
by JoeBallantyne
It would be great if you could post that treatise you wrote on the site.

I'm interested in reading it, and I am sure others are also.

Joe.

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2023 2:22 am
by Richard Hull
The trick with any H thyratron switching near its voltage and current limit is to allow for a short but real kick back of negative circuit voltage across the tube to turn it off. Naturally the grid is also at zero volts during this time period. Typically on times of 2-5us with a rep rate of up to 1khz is about the limit at full rated power on a 5C22. Again you need a current reversal to turn this bad boy off. Common in a ringing circuit with inductance. First negative ring pulse turns off the thyratron.

I used this as a switch of the HVDC to a tesla coil primary. Quiet and worked great on 4 or 5 difference setups and different H thyratron tubes.

Richard Hull

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2023 11:29 am
by Rich Gorski
Seems like you could DC bias the 5C22 grid negatively to say -200V. Then supply a +500V pulse to the grid to turn it on. A 500V pulse should be no trouble with today's MOSFET type devices. That should guarantee turn off. In the like manner you could also positively bias the cathode/heater circuit at +200V. Then again pulse to grid at +500V to turn it on. With the anode at high HV biasing the grid or cathode at a few hundred volts shouldn't change operating characteristics much.

On a similar topic, I have created a single shot pulser system from scratch using a 2.75CF cube (photo below). The cube contains two tungsten 1/4" diameter electrode rods held at an adjustable ~1/4" gap on two adjacent ports. Vacuum was through a third port going down into the 10-5 Torr range. One of the W electrodes is connected to a 15uF, 45kV C bank (15kJ at full voltage) with the other W electrode connected to a PFN and then to the pulse device which was a coaxial plasma rail gun in this case. Switching was accomplished by a puff valve on a fourth port of the cube which was filled with helium gas at ATM pressure. The valve was activated by a simple solenoid. The sudden gas emitted into the cube chamber fired the switch effectively connecting the C bank to ground through the rail gun. The purpose of this was to measure plasma velocity by TOF measurement for fusion possibilities. Highest velocity measured back then was on the order of 150km/s using helium. This is nearing fusion capability. I don't recall the pulse current but I'm sure it was in the KAmps over a period of around 50us. One interesting problem was that I blew up turbo controllers regularly due to some pulse current/voltage finding its way back through the ground system and into the controller. I tried a number of things to fix the problem with only limited success and finally decided on just switching to a diff pump (no electronics).

Rich G.
HV switch.jpg

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2023 6:04 pm
by Richard Hester
The only problem with a mosfet switching scheme is that the grid of a triode thyratron pulses up to near the plate supply voltage at turn-on. I found this out the hard way trying to drive a 2050 thyratron with a CMOS gate - worked the first few pulses, then no more gate... A drive transformer might be a better solution. A small horizonal output tube may be the bee's knees in that application, as it is rated for the 6kV retrace pulse in a horizontal scan drive/TV HV supply.

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Wed Jul 12, 2023 1:30 am
by Richard Hull
Richard H. is correct. Way back in the 80's when I worked with hydrogen thyratrons pulsing in the megawatt peak range. I used a 555 to trigger the grid and a hand wound pulse xfrmr to protect the 555 variable rate/duty pulser electronics. FET switches may never reach the 5000amp pulse capability of the larger ceramic H2 thyratrons.

Richard Hull

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2023 7:54 am
by Steven Sesselmann
If I recall correctly Doug was using two negatively biased grids, one was creating the ions the second one was fusing them. I tried explaining to Doug how he was creating slow ions, but I don't think he was listening, but in my view it is entirely plausible that his somewhat crude reactor was producing a lot of neutrons and I don't believe it had anything to do with oscillation.

Deuterons in your fusors don't fuse because they collide with high energy, on the contrary they merge because they have low energy, in much the same way as Dragon docks with the space station. It simply couldn't dock if it was going the opposite way at 15000 m/s, it needs to have the same speed and direction.

How do we create deuterons with low velocity?

We ionise them at low potential and this is exactly what happens in a fusor, a very small number of deuterium atoms give up their electrons near the grid (most don't) and it is these deuterons that move slowly enough to fuse.

Doug stacked the odds in his favour, he had a second grid and was making more of those slow neutrons which then drifted into the main grid.

Sorry to be blunt, but the whole idea of the triple product or Lawson criterion is plain wrong.

Ions lighter than Iron want to fuse, you only need to bring them together and let them dance at the same speed and direction. The Universe simply wouldn't be here if it was that hard to fuse nuclei.

Physics is broken in so many ways, much of what you all have learned and what you all believe is wrong, but if there ever was a group of people who could understand this it is precisely you guys, because unlike most theoretical physicists most of you have real hands on experience with high voltage, electrostatic potential and plasma, the stuff we are made of.

Electrostatic potential is all you need to make a Universe.

😊

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2023 3:30 pm
by Richard Hull
For my money all you need is mass/gravity and electrostatic potential. Gravity, ( a potential energy) to move neutral mass to either collision or accretion which can separate charge in major events or solar accretions freeing up protons and electrons to spew out of solar masses. and from here electrostatic potential takes over with ensuing neutralizations creating photons and magnetism within closed current loops.

Outside of mass, only two potential energies are needed to get an kinematic universe. Light, magnetism and motion are by products of these two fixed potential energies. Via collisions and accretions potential energies are regenerated. The kinetic motion and charge separation is forever warranted. Light can cause kinematic motion on a small scale but ultimately bleeds its energy away in collisons which separate charge with a reduction in its energy and wavelength until it can no longer offer a pressure or charge separation within a kinematic universe. ("heat death")

For those few who do not believe gravity is a potential energy, that is why I noted "mass/gravity". Matter warps space to an infinite distance, though by the laws of "Warping or gravity", take your choice, it is only strong locally. Light obeys (gravitational/warped-space) beckoning's as does neutral and charged matter which it captures in orbital motion or impactful collision or accelerates with change of direction. Electromagnetic radiation is a force of forever lost and degraded energy created solely by the two potential energies.

Light and magnetism are created via electrostatic potential energy reactions within and about matter. This is often forced due to the external force of gravity via accretion or collision.

Richard Hull

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2023 6:18 pm
by Steven Sesselmann
Richard Hull wrote: ↑Mon Jul 17, 2023 3:30 pm For my money all you need is mass/gravity and electrostatic potential.

Richard Hull
Richard is right, but I believe I can prove conclusively that mass and gravity is just electrostatic potential in disguise

First I would like to acknowledge the late John Hendron, an active member of this forum who sadly passed away several years ago. John was an electric engineer, deep thinker and somewhat eccentric, Irish and very funny, he kept his cards close, but kept insisting that I think about electric potential. Although John never actually told me why, he was either paranoid that someone would steal his idea or he simply didn't know. In any case he made me think about electric potential.

So I did, and soon realised that our Universe is a topology of electric potential. The penny literally dropped ......., nothing is more positive than a proton!

...nothing is more positive than a proton.

Think about it, the definition of electric potential is E/q (energy over charge). How much energy can you put over 1 charge?

The absolute maximum energy that can be put above one charge in our Universe is 1 proton, and according to Einstein this is 938 million volts (give or take a few kV). Even if you had a cosmic bull dozer and piled up a bunch of protons their potential E/q would still be 938 MV!

This means electric potential is "absolute", by the term absolute I mean any electric potential can be expressed as a fraction of absolute potential, in the same was as any speed can be expressed as a fraction of "c".

And by the way, this is not a coincidence, we can indeed write the equation for electric potential and speed.  ∆v = c(∆V/Ø) where Ø is absolute potential.

..electric potential is absolute

How does this explain Gravity?

To understand this we need to include the observer. Physics (excluding quantum physics) largely excludes the observer, it's all about body A and body B and the motion between them, sun, moon etc.. It's almost as if we want to put our experiment in a box and pretend we don't exist.

As observers we exist somewhere within that electric potential landscape and we understand protons are more positive than us and we know electrons are more negative than us, therefore our potential should be somewhere in between, you follow me ?

It is also pretty obvious that our electric potential ought to be the same as earths ground potential, since sparks don't usually fly when we walk along the ground. So what is the earths electric potential in absolute terms ?

what is the earths electric potential in absolute terms ?

I won't bother writing the equation for it here, but if anyone really wants it they can PM me, but here we don't need the exact solution, so we can make a guess....

Earths major elemental composition is iron, so let's just assume we live on a lump of Iron, it won't be far off the mark. What is the Mass per nucleon of Iron? Look it up.... near enough to 930 Mev/c^2 for our back of the envelope calculation.

We are starting to form a picture...., The surface of a proton is 938 MV, the surface of the earth id 930 MV, the surface of an electron is 0.5 MV...

Aha....., 💡 this explains why the electron is so tiny, it sits in it's own extremely deep potential energy well (with respect to ground) and has suffered a mass defect, that suggests it may actually be an anti proton. Hmm, that would explain the missing antimatter problem.

I will end this post here and let the reader think about what I have just written.

Can any of you see how this leads to gravity?

Steven

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2023 7:00 pm
by Dennis P Brown
Steven, I have a small book that certainly agrees with your and Richard's basic idea that potentials are a possible methodology to explain gravity. I do not share that belief but certainly someone worked out a lot of electromagnetic equations to arrive at a possible solution. It is called "Causality Electromagnetic Induction and Gravitation" by Oleg Jefimenko.

Guess you could also order one and see if it follows what you believe. In Chapter 5 he takes a rather large leap of faith (or maybe just an acceptable idea) to couple gravity and E&M potentials. You can be the judge if this is proper or not. I've decide to follow a quantum mechanical approch. But each their own ;)

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2023 12:03 am
by Richard Hull
I do not subscribe to gravity as an electrically related force. It is a function of neutral mass. For our senses, neutral accreted mass. Whether it is a potential energy generated by matter or matter's effect on space-time is immaterial. The bottom line is that without neutral mass there is no gravity or warped or curved space.

Gravity is the exact opposite of electrostatic potential energy. It is attractive only from simple observation and works on neutral or charged matter. It causes big stuff to move towards the larger mass potential only. Gravity works over longer distances on large ponderable masses. A beam of fast neutrons drops according to S=1/2 gt^2 as shown in numerous experiments here on earth. Thermal neutrons can be operated on by the most gentle of breezes, unless they are in an absolute vacuum and then gravity works on them as well.

Electrostatics works only at relatively short range on relatively small charged masses. (electrons or charged spheres, filing cabinets, etc. Large charges can be "inducted" onto ponderable neutral masses. Many nuclear particles can also be acted upon by a magnetic field. The origin of all static magnetic fields are charges in uniform motion. Accelerate or decelerate charged particles and you get photons (EM radiation).

Richard Hull

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2023 6:42 am
by Steven Sesselmann
Richard,

You said :
I do not subscribe to gravity as an electrically related force. It is a function of neutral mass.
When electrons and protons combine in just the right ratio where energy per charge (E/q) matches that of the observer, we call it a neutral mass at rest, however if E/q of a body is higher or lower than the observers E/q then we see positive or negative motion accordingly.

Inertia is nothing more than the change in overall energy of a body, to set a body in motion you need to change "E" because "q" is generally fixed.
Gravity is the exact opposite of electrostatic potential energy. It is attractive only
Gravity does indeed repel, but it only does so when it's on the other side of ground potential, and for historical reasons it is called Buoyancy, but it's just stuff that has higher potential than stuff around it, like bubbles in a liquid or helium balloons in air.

Mass per nucleon of helium is higher than Iron, so it has higher potential and floats up. (according to classical mechanics helium should fall under gravity)

Conclusion, we have all been indoctrinated with a false information, not deliberately, it was just the same old egocentric thinking of man, that led to geocentric models of the Universe and other silly ideas that have since been abandoned.

It's going to be a painful revolution with a lot of paper going to waste, but all for the better.

Steven

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2023 3:56 pm
by Emma Black
This may be off topic but after reading this thread from the start I was very curious about what the reported "gonzo" mode event was and ended up down a rabbit hole of old threads. There really are some interesting elements to the story and its very cool that the original fusor has a new home and investigation work is continuing. It's great this site has a full archive.

As an outsider who is only reading the threads now, the question that springs to mind for those potentially in the know is. Did Doug somehow end up with some strongly contaminated heavy water or deuterium gas (contaminated by tritium)? With previous mentions of research purity gas I wondered if some kind of mistake by the supplier could have occurred? You would hope there would be a tight control on such things but mistakes do happen.

Sorry if this has been asked before but could this explain a 100 times boosted fusion yield as well as getting sick for a couple of weeks? Tritium would also hang around in the walls of the fusor for a while boosting yield, like it does in tritiated Ti targets for neutron sources.

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2023 5:58 pm
by Steven Sesselmann
Emma,

My own experience is that these events are brief unplanned "WTF" moments, and with vacuum pumps HV and everything else running it is difficult to compose yourself quickly enough to pull out a spectrometer and record a gamma spectrum. When it happens your mind is going 100 miles an hour trying to figure out what went wrong and why. The most like reason is electronic noise, neutron detector are incredibly sensitive to noise, but radiation is always at the back of your mind and you can't help thinking "what if...", the thought alone is enough to make you sick.

My recent approach to experimenting has been to avoid those stressful "WTF" moments by operating the fusor remotely. I also recommend having a gamma spectrometer running in parallel. Remote operation comes with it's own challenges, longer cables means more noise, so I ended up using optical USB connection which is good, but as mentioned higher up in the thread the resolution of our actuators are often insufficient to get fine control of the gas pressure and voltage, nothing like hands on the spokes wheel analogue control.

My advise is to build your experiment from the ground up expecting the unexpected, log as many parameters as possible, this way we won't have to have such long discussions after your demise.

Steven

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2023 7:56 pm
by Dennis P Brown
Sorry Richard, my error in not fully reading all entries before posting a replay - was rushed and also careless.

I do believe this post has taken a rather diverted path and further discussions on the theory of gravity and electromagnetism should be done via private messaging (certainly I should have done that about the book. Again, sorry.)

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2023 9:52 pm
by Steven Sesselmann
Dennis P Brown wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 7:56 pm I do believe this post has taken a rather diverted path...
My fault, it's all to easy to diverge off topic, sometimes hard to avoid going down a few rabbit holes when trying to explain new ideas, I should opened a new thread, sorry.

Steven

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2023 5:14 pm
by Richard Hull
People who have actually done fusion and do fusion on a more or less continuous basis look at Doug's claim with a very if not extremely jaundiced eye. These same advanced fusioneers have done activation over a period of time involving numerous materials and understand what it takes to activate materials and have a copy of the table of the isotopes and have become familiar with it and its use.

I personally do not believe Doug's claim at all. He supplied no real well documented evidence and a bizarre claim of steel tools being activated and having to throw them away. If one looks at time of exposure, range of tools from source and the activation cross section of the metals involved along with their half-lives, It doesn't jibe with the claims. Doug gave no precise time of exposure. No range data to the tools and no actual activation readings of radiation from the tools and no listing of the tools discarded. Really sloppy reporting for such a plus ultra setup.

Basically, Doug said things went sideways in some mode that frightened him and he turned the system off. His main claim was that he got terribly ill. Then he claimed tools were radioactive and had to be tossed out. This means a very long half-life that was never tested.

Remember, activation demands thermal neutrons!!! Fusion produces only fast neutrons. Were the tools in a 2-inch thick HDPE tool box up against the fusor??

Believe what you will.

Please note I did not use block quotes as I feel all here worth their salt have followed, read, understood, and followed this post's thread in its tortured but readable path. If you failed miserably at understanding and truly want to understand and that is the key thing here, re-read that which came before. Self-direct yourself to read, follow and comprehend.

Richard Hull

Re: Fusor as an oscillator....A serious discussion

Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2023 6:00 pm
by Matt_Gibson
I too had several instances where I watched my readings go really really really high (200x the normal rate). I also noticed that this was only happening when I was pushing my voltage to the point where the air was begging to breakdown (lots of hissing and crackling). The probe was also right up against the fusor chamber. While the detector was suggesting legit high numbers, it became apparent that this was most likely due to noise/interference from the high voltage. As soon as I dropped voltage enough to prevent the hissing and crackling, the numbers went back to normal.

-Matt