FYI
This is a PDF I have read several times now in my search for new
ideas to try.
It briefly outlines all the fusion approaches electrostatic/ magnetic and combined
(including polywell) problems and results. There are quite a few that may enhance a normal fusor.
Well worth the read.
Dustin.
http://www.askmar.com/Fusion_files/Magn ... nement.pdf
Another futile fusion initiative - Rather local too!
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Doug Coulter
- Posts: 1312
- Joined: Sun May 27, 2007 3:18 pm
- Real name: Doug Coulter
- Location: Floyd, VA, USA
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Re: Another futile fusion initiative - Rather local too!
Chris,
I think there are several reasons people are averse to magnetics, and it's a pretty long list.
For one thing, the $30 DVM everyone has doesn't measure that, you need the $400 thing you turned me on to (which was hard to find even though I had the money) -- and it was pretty illuminating how different the predictions of optimistic magnet manufactures are from reality, and how tough it is to get the fields the way you want them, really.
The jargon with mixed units is like a guild secret thing, and yeah, it's a whole new set of things to learn. Just like every wire is also a resistor, every magnetic conductor isn't perfect, and on and on as well.
Permanent magnets don't live well in vacuum either -- heat kills them fast. And plain old electromagnets make plenty of heat on their own. I've killed my share of NeFeB magnets at this game.
As Richard points out, there's been one heck of a lot of trash talked about using magnets on plasmas, none of which has truly paid off yet. Many idiot mistakes have been made with them for sure, for example the "magnetic heating" they use in a tokomak, where the plasma is the secondary of a transformer, just gets all the ions going in the same direction -- this is just dumb, like cars on a highway, when all the vectors match (all going the same way), no crashes, and in this case we want them.
And of course, you have to either live with the fact that a magnet does something quite different to electrons and ions of the same energy due to the mass difference and of course polarity -- you can use this to work for or against you and most don't get that. A field that would do interesting things for electrons in a fusor wouldn't do much to the ions at all....possibilities are there.
I could add more, but you get the picture. Bussard's thing really only would work in a cusp free situation -- a monopole, good luck making that work. Groups of charged particles are pretty squirrely to control with simple setups, they tend to have a mind of their own, even get into what I'd have to call emergent behavior when in crowds.
I agree about cyclotrons, and your thing needs a decent try -- have you yet posted about your patent application and the idea? I think it will get some interest here as a good use of magnetic fields.
I certainly thought it was worth a serious shot, though as you know already, it's going to be hard to get working with minimal test gear and realistic effort input at some point I think you're going to wind up in my lab/shop where we have the right tools for all that -- you're invited across the pond anytime.
One thing though -- even with electric fields, I still hear things that assume that just because I put X volts on an electrode, that's the speed all my ions are accelerated to.
Sorry fellas, that is just sloppy thinking, get out your faraday probes and energy spectrometers and prove that -- you'll find out, just like in vacuum electron tubes, that it's the NET Field that matters, including that from whatever charged particles you've got in there. And I'm going to be a pain in the ... until I quit hearing that bad assumption over and over. I happen to think (and just my opinion here) that it's going to be real important at some point.
We are working up some instrumentation on that one. We've made a pinhole camera, that can see charged particles, and/or X rays, we can put a Be foil over the hole and just see X rays too.
Add a small magnet, and we can see which polarity the particles are by which way the image shifts, as of right now, we can't be sure what we're seeing, but it's nice to see anything at all.
May be a surprise or two when we do that. As that project progresses, I'll put up some pix, it's really fun to play with on a wobble stick, but hard to get good pictures of, as auto-exposure tends to over expose the detail on the bright spot that is the main thing you see when pointing it at a fusor grid.
Magnets have their uses, but anything that pushes 90 degrees to the existing vector just messes up people's heads too easily, and doesn't really solve much in the way of containment, just changes the monkey motions on the way to loss of containment. That's been pretty well thrashed from linear Q machine on up to present. Combo E and H fields could be promising, but most can't intuit this well enough to come up with something workable. I sure see plenty smoke, mirrors, and arm waving around it, that all look like BS to me.
Seems like one of those things that *after* some one gets it working, it will be obvious in hindsight.
I am willing to be surprised.
I think there are several reasons people are averse to magnetics, and it's a pretty long list.
For one thing, the $30 DVM everyone has doesn't measure that, you need the $400 thing you turned me on to (which was hard to find even though I had the money) -- and it was pretty illuminating how different the predictions of optimistic magnet manufactures are from reality, and how tough it is to get the fields the way you want them, really.
The jargon with mixed units is like a guild secret thing, and yeah, it's a whole new set of things to learn. Just like every wire is also a resistor, every magnetic conductor isn't perfect, and on and on as well.
Permanent magnets don't live well in vacuum either -- heat kills them fast. And plain old electromagnets make plenty of heat on their own. I've killed my share of NeFeB magnets at this game.
As Richard points out, there's been one heck of a lot of trash talked about using magnets on plasmas, none of which has truly paid off yet. Many idiot mistakes have been made with them for sure, for example the "magnetic heating" they use in a tokomak, where the plasma is the secondary of a transformer, just gets all the ions going in the same direction -- this is just dumb, like cars on a highway, when all the vectors match (all going the same way), no crashes, and in this case we want them.
And of course, you have to either live with the fact that a magnet does something quite different to electrons and ions of the same energy due to the mass difference and of course polarity -- you can use this to work for or against you and most don't get that. A field that would do interesting things for electrons in a fusor wouldn't do much to the ions at all....possibilities are there.
I could add more, but you get the picture. Bussard's thing really only would work in a cusp free situation -- a monopole, good luck making that work. Groups of charged particles are pretty squirrely to control with simple setups, they tend to have a mind of their own, even get into what I'd have to call emergent behavior when in crowds.
I agree about cyclotrons, and your thing needs a decent try -- have you yet posted about your patent application and the idea? I think it will get some interest here as a good use of magnetic fields.
I certainly thought it was worth a serious shot, though as you know already, it's going to be hard to get working with minimal test gear and realistic effort input at some point I think you're going to wind up in my lab/shop where we have the right tools for all that -- you're invited across the pond anytime.
One thing though -- even with electric fields, I still hear things that assume that just because I put X volts on an electrode, that's the speed all my ions are accelerated to.
Sorry fellas, that is just sloppy thinking, get out your faraday probes and energy spectrometers and prove that -- you'll find out, just like in vacuum electron tubes, that it's the NET Field that matters, including that from whatever charged particles you've got in there. And I'm going to be a pain in the ... until I quit hearing that bad assumption over and over. I happen to think (and just my opinion here) that it's going to be real important at some point.
We are working up some instrumentation on that one. We've made a pinhole camera, that can see charged particles, and/or X rays, we can put a Be foil over the hole and just see X rays too.
Add a small magnet, and we can see which polarity the particles are by which way the image shifts, as of right now, we can't be sure what we're seeing, but it's nice to see anything at all.
May be a surprise or two when we do that. As that project progresses, I'll put up some pix, it's really fun to play with on a wobble stick, but hard to get good pictures of, as auto-exposure tends to over expose the detail on the bright spot that is the main thing you see when pointing it at a fusor grid.
Magnets have their uses, but anything that pushes 90 degrees to the existing vector just messes up people's heads too easily, and doesn't really solve much in the way of containment, just changes the monkey motions on the way to loss of containment. That's been pretty well thrashed from linear Q machine on up to present. Combo E and H fields could be promising, but most can't intuit this well enough to come up with something workable. I sure see plenty smoke, mirrors, and arm waving around it, that all look like BS to me.
Seems like one of those things that *after* some one gets it working, it will be obvious in hindsight.
I am willing to be surprised.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
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Chris Bradley
- Posts: 2930
- Joined: Fri May 02, 2008 7:05 am
- Real name:
Re: Another futile fusion initiative - Rather local too!
Doug Coulter wrote:
> the "magnetic heating" they use in a tokomak, where the plasma is the secondary of a transformer, just gets all the ions going in the same direction -- this is just dumb, like cars on a highway, when all the vectors match (all going the same way), no crashes, and in this case we want them.
Actually, it might be of interested to note that, on 'crank-over' of a tokamak, about a half of all the fusions are actually 'beam-target' as the ionised stuff is accelerated and the neutral stuff gets in the way. So just like a fusor then! If it wasn't for this process in a tokamak's 'start-up' cycle, then the plasma wouldn't get anywhere near hot enough. Even tokamaks rely on beam-target fusion!!
> it's going to be hard to get working with minimal test gear and realistic effort input at some point I think you're going to wind up in my lab/shop
Thanks for the support/confidence. Indeed, a point may come where I have to re-appraise matters of detection and instrumentation and I'd like to take up such kind offers, but I'm not looking to win any neutron-production trophies just yet so my initial diagnostic instrument for now will be "eye-ball Mk.1".
> even with electric fields, I still hear things that assume that just because I put X volts on an electrode, that's the speed all my ions are accelerated to. Sorry fellas, that is just sloppy thinking
I agree with you, and the effect of charge accumulations on e-fields. Not sure I've said otherwise, but just to clarify my point in reply to Richard; my inference was that it is only an e-field that can *do work* on a charged particle, a magnetic field cannot do work (except by induction, which is, as Richard alludes to, therefore a secondary production of an e-field in the particle's frame).
> Magnets have their uses, but anything that pushes 90 degrees to the existing vector just messes up people's heads too easily
Yeah, I'm with you on that. The evolving human perception, hunting game on the plains, never had to develop a sense of 'rotating' things. That's why we can get a feel for what would happen if you push a cow over, but if it's a gyroscope then it's entirely non-intuitive for our linear-physics evolved reptilian brain to figure out it wouldn't fall over! All the more reason to suspect there might be some processes/methods as yet not intuitively deduced in regards rotating solutions??!
> I am willing to be surprised.
Me too!!... I guess we'd not be doing this stuff unless we were trying to surprise even ourselves!
> the "magnetic heating" they use in a tokomak, where the plasma is the secondary of a transformer, just gets all the ions going in the same direction -- this is just dumb, like cars on a highway, when all the vectors match (all going the same way), no crashes, and in this case we want them.
Actually, it might be of interested to note that, on 'crank-over' of a tokamak, about a half of all the fusions are actually 'beam-target' as the ionised stuff is accelerated and the neutral stuff gets in the way. So just like a fusor then! If it wasn't for this process in a tokamak's 'start-up' cycle, then the plasma wouldn't get anywhere near hot enough. Even tokamaks rely on beam-target fusion!!
> it's going to be hard to get working with minimal test gear and realistic effort input at some point I think you're going to wind up in my lab/shop
Thanks for the support/confidence. Indeed, a point may come where I have to re-appraise matters of detection and instrumentation and I'd like to take up such kind offers, but I'm not looking to win any neutron-production trophies just yet so my initial diagnostic instrument for now will be "eye-ball Mk.1".
> even with electric fields, I still hear things that assume that just because I put X volts on an electrode, that's the speed all my ions are accelerated to. Sorry fellas, that is just sloppy thinking
I agree with you, and the effect of charge accumulations on e-fields. Not sure I've said otherwise, but just to clarify my point in reply to Richard; my inference was that it is only an e-field that can *do work* on a charged particle, a magnetic field cannot do work (except by induction, which is, as Richard alludes to, therefore a secondary production of an e-field in the particle's frame).
> Magnets have their uses, but anything that pushes 90 degrees to the existing vector just messes up people's heads too easily
Yeah, I'm with you on that. The evolving human perception, hunting game on the plains, never had to develop a sense of 'rotating' things. That's why we can get a feel for what would happen if you push a cow over, but if it's a gyroscope then it's entirely non-intuitive for our linear-physics evolved reptilian brain to figure out it wouldn't fall over! All the more reason to suspect there might be some processes/methods as yet not intuitively deduced in regards rotating solutions??!
> I am willing to be surprised.
Me too!!... I guess we'd not be doing this stuff unless we were trying to surprise even ourselves!
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Chris Bradley
- Posts: 2930
- Joined: Fri May 02, 2008 7:05 am
- Real name:
Re: Another futile fusion initiative - Rather local too!
Doug Coulter wrote:
> for example the "magnetic heating" they use in a tokomak, where the plasma is the secondary of a transformer, just gets all the ions going in the same direction
On this point, and my reply, I did previously post on this;
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=6877#p47578
note how the actual thermonuclear fraction takes a long part of the pulse to crank up.
> for example the "magnetic heating" they use in a tokomak, where the plasma is the secondary of a transformer, just gets all the ions going in the same direction
On this point, and my reply, I did previously post on this;
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=6877#p47578
note how the actual thermonuclear fraction takes a long part of the pulse to crank up.