New Fusor paper

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Dan Tibbets
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New Fusor paper

Post by Dan Tibbets »

Some of the information may have been presented at previous meetings, but this new paper should have all of the details from a U. of Wisconsin researcher.

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/pdf/fdm1392.pdf

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Doug Coulter
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Re: New Fusor paper

Post by Doug Coulter »

Thanks a million (neutrons/second?) for the link, Dan. Only on pg 45 so far, but already most of the things I've measured that have been called "controversial" - have been replicated and explained in this paper.

We tried to measure recirculation - none, really was found.
I tried making a collimated neutron detector to see if there's a big peak at the core. None found.
Tyler C and I both think we've seen real big gradients in neutrons measured right near the shell, as if either beaming was happening, or there was localized neutron production quite near the shell.

All these got significant skepticism here and elsewhere - but this paper checks us on all of them so far.
I'll put it up on our site library and link to it from inside the site.

Nice to have someone "official" come along and verify you were right the whole time. Hah!

Edit:

Still reading this, but further on, it also looks like Richard's musings about having a D absorbing chamber liner were also on track. I'm not so sure that my own experience agrees with their method of doing the Ti coating and D loading - I can think of better ways that won't have their reported problems, but they did get a major improvement with it anyway. However, they seem to be saying that the extra D in the walls isn't for creating ions at the right place, but fusion right there, beam-on-target, from negative ions created in charge exchanges near the grid, then accelerated back to the walls fast - almost like a tandem accelerator.

Interestingly, it's taking them 10 more mA at 40kv to get the same neutron output as Richard's fusor does. So Richard gets at least two "HAH!"'s out of this one himself.

This is one interesting paper!
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
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Chris Bradley
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Re: New Fusor paper

Post by Chris Bradley »

Chris Bradley wrote:
> "Just to cover the shell and grid fusions; fast ions can, obviously, stream into the grid and may embed themselves there. Other fast ions may come along and collide with those already-embedded nuclei. Result: fusion. The other outcome is that a fast ion may charge-exchange with the neutral background medium, and this process sees a ‘fast neutral’ formed which heads straight out, away from the centre. As the ions would probably be following the beamlines (where the ions are more concentrated), then the trajectories will focus on small spots at the end of the beamlines. As more fast neutrals also strike the outer shell at the same spot, there is then a potentially high probability of a neutral-neutral fusion event in the shell at those spots. This would give non-isotropic readings close in to the shell, and if you have a detector just one inch from a hot spot on the shell, then you might be one inch from a reaction centre and not the so-many inches to the centre of the fusor, which’d then confound your TIER calculation."
(viewtopic.php?f=14&t=6919#p42602)

A couple of years back, I also did a hand-wavy calculation [on another forum] to explain the possibility that charge-neutralised ions, leading to fast neutral-shell target fusions, might be a plausible explaination of where the few fusion neutrons detected by the late Dr Bussard might have come from. The calculations seemed to suggest that [neutral] beam-shell fusions may be as much as 10 times as likely as fast ion-background reactions. The collision cross-section for charge neutralisation is very high, and the probabilty of an ion fusing before it charge-neutralises is extremely small.
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