Poisoned Loading

[Mark Rowley]

I may have just learned a lesson the hard way.

I over the past week or I have been getting excellent neutron numbers as the deuterium has loaded onto the inner walls of the chamber.

Over the past several days I have been addressing the chamber heating issue by repurposing a small window type AC unit. During the modification, I ran the fusor multiple times with regular air to test the cooling properties of the AC unit. On one occasion I intentionally ran it on air for up to 30 minutes to really push the temp up as high as possible. Anyway, the cooling mod seems to work well but when I fired the system up with D2 my numbers were way down. Obviously the plan is to run it a bunch more over the next few days to reload the walls and see if things improve.

If not, then maybe there’s another issue. Can a fusor chamber be too cold during high output runs?

Mark Rowley

[Frank Sanns]

Air kills it. Even opening a chamber up for a minute will take a full week of running to get back near full neutron output.

The question remains though, is it loading or is it degassing? A deuterium loaded target does not
lose deuterium so easily so that points in great part to non fusible gas contamination.

[Richard Hull]

Probably non-fusible gas leaving the walls, moisture etc. I left my fusor alone for 3 days and it took a full 2 days to get the numbers back up. (leaks) doing fine now.

Richard Hull