Lightning initated fusor

[Charles Elkins]

I had an idea the other day that I have been playing with in my head. Kick start a large Fusor with a lightning strike triggered by a model rocket launched into a storm. Not sure how big the reaction would be though. I feel it would likely burn up all the available fusible fuel before it could be replenished. I don't believe that ether grid would burn up because of the short duration of the strike. However it might just vaporize the grids! It would be interesting to have test results from a multi-gigawatt fusor. And yes I know by suggesting this I open the door for "Back to the Future" jokes. The first response I got here at the university was that I should invest in a Flux capacitor. LOL

[Steven Sesselmann]

Charles,

Interesting idea, allthough not all that practical.

You don't really need to wait for a storm, a conductor launced upwards would pick up a pretty good charge on any day. The fusor being a pretty good insulator, might not attract a lightning bolt anyway.

You could do a partalell test, put a lightning rod on the roof, and at the same time save a search on ebay for a HV power supply, then see which one strikes first

Steven

[Brett]

I actually proposed doing something like that, (A zeta pinch through lithium deuteride, though; A fusor wouldn't benefit from the huge pulse.) as one of the events at a techie gathering some of my college friends used to put on.

It was vetoed on the basis that it might work, and that would be *bad*.

"You could do a partalell test, put a lightning rod on the roof, and at the same time save a search on ebay for a HV power supply, then see which one strikes first"

That's cheating: The point of a lightning rod is to keep lightning from striking, by discharging the potential at the top of the protected structure. If it's working right, you DON'T get hit by lightning.

[lutzhoffman]

This had been tried in the alps, a long time ago a Swiss scientist constructed a segmented discharge tube, which was in effect a DC linac. The plan was to have it ready to go with spark type of ion source at one end, and then wait. I do not think it worked, or maybe they just got tired of waiting since they did not know about the thin wire rocket method back then. Maybe if you live in Florida, and if you build a big insulating tower then you could get it to go.

The problem with a normal fusor design is that the discharge will go just about everywhere else at the same time, because you cannot insulate something this small enough, so even if you got lucky only a small fraction of the discharge whould go towards blowing up your fusor.

It would be interesting if someone did build something like a 50 meter long DC linac, and produced a massive fusion pulse.

The best precident would be the segmented Marx bank accellerator which did run at over 2 MV, it however self destructed with each discharge, and the sections had to be re-assembled with vacuum wax each time. The result was also a massive radiation pulse of X-rays, and other radiation, they mentioned something about a reaction between the protons, and the nitrogen in the air which was the target. This is from about 100 years ago.

[Charles Elkins]

lutzhoffman, Thank you for the great info! I will have to do more research and see what I can dig up on that Swiss experiment with liner accelerators.

I was under the impression (might just have miss observed) that when the vacuum chamber is pumped down that it is more conductive than when it is at atmospheric pressure. When I had my demo fusor power supply on and the chamber was not under vacuum it would short across my bridge rectifier. Once the chamber was pumped down some the element would start to glow and stop shorting across the diodes. Once the pressure came back up it would again it would start to short ac cross the diodes like it did before it was pumped down. I made a note that it was interesting to find that the chamber under high vacuum was more conductive than air at 30" of mercury. Has anyone else seen this effect? I was hoping to exploit this effect for and experiment. My getting the lighting to follow the wire up from the rocket(our down depending on conditions) to the fusor anode which I hoped would be more conductive than the around it.

Its been 2 years since I fired up my fusor and want to design a new one using Autodesk Inventor. I will finally finish my degree in Industrial technology in May.

[lutzhoffman]

Ref: Vacuum conductivity, an evacuated space will only conduct well if it has some residual gas left in it to ionize. Once you get a high enough vacuum, a vacuum becomes a great insulator.

Take a TV tube, or a hot cathode X-ray tube for example: In the X-ray tube a small 2 cm high vacuum gap between the cathode, and the anode will hold off over 150 KV. If the cathode is not heated to release electrons, then it will not conduct across the space between the cathode and the anode. Now there are some other ways to initiate conduction in a vacuum like field emmision etc, the same thing is however still true, something needs to supply the electrons, for any conduction to occur through the insulating vacuum space.

[nemesistech]

Have you been reading about aTesla? He had some interesting ideas about using lightning to kickstart various things....