Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

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Richard Hull
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Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Richard Hull »

Don Bowen talked of loading a wire with deuterium in the fusion news forum. I have moved my take on this to this forum as it seems a doable experiment and another way to get fusion, albeit again, at extreme net loss..... My transfer below picks up.

Now someone is talking experiment that is doable. However, blowing up paladium wire can be very costly. Ti or Ni would be the logical D loading choice. I would feel a lot better using a bubble detector on this as opposed to an electronic detector. The detector could be placed as close as 1/4" from the blast using an intervening piece of aluminum flashing.

I have done this sort of impulse work before when investigating water arc explosions in the 1990's. With near 100 thousand ampere pulses, it is really possible to wind up with something far more potent than a few mv neutron signal on the detector's center conductor. Leaving you to report lies

There is indeed a pinch effect in spots along a round 10 gauge wire due to amperian forces along an exploding wire, I have visual proof of this in some fragments of wire detonated with just enough energy to blow it to tiny bits without any significant vaporization occuring. What's more, the pinched breaks are hollow stress based, crystaline breaks with hollow, unfused "banana like" tips.

If the wire is single layer coiled, then and additional depressed linear channel of stress is found running longitudinally along what was the inner side of the inductor wire. (assumed to be a higher current streamline point due to the decreased inner inductance path.) It is to be remembered that the event is of a period where, almost certainly, only surface currents flow. (no "soak" in time)

Loading metal lattices to their maximum extent is a bit of an electrochemical art. I doubt I would be up to it, but the experiment sounds intriguing. With enough loaded wire on hand, one could try different impulse levels to determine if there was any fusion at all, and if any, whether there was a sweet spot in the energy input level.

Probably the best loading info can only be found in the CF websites where this has been somewhat refined over the last 20 years.

I am almost positive you would have some fusion in a properly staged event, but would it be detectable in amateur hands? I am equally sure that watt-second for watt-second, the fusor would beat it and the fusor is a terrible fusion system when looking at fusion energy released. Still, a fun piece of experiment in the fusion arena.

Stuff that would be needed.... Ni and Ti wire (20-30 gauge), heavy water, a low voltage DC supply for loading the wire, A high voltage capacitor (1-10ufd @20kv), a HVDC supply (rectified, home built, neon transformer supply would work well here. Some tiny flakes of sodium or potassium metal to create a deuterated electrolyte and finally a sensitive bubble detector 30 +++ bubbles/mrem

Richard Hull
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Chris Bradley »

If it would work in a wire, why not in a narrow tube of [deuterated] water (with enough ionic content to make it conductive)? If the material compression is rapid enough for fusion processes, would the water not act as much like a solid as the wire, over those time scales?

You could add a little powder of some description to make it act thixiotropically, if you felt it was necessary?

In fact.... better still a colloidal, or constantly agitated (e.g. sonic-bath type stimulation), suspension of metallic powder to improve its conductivity further still.
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Richard Hull »

Ideas but no experiments, yet. I think I would stick with the wire as the deuterium is in a regular lattice within a relatively good conductor. Blowing up heavy water can get rather expensive as well at about 50 cents per cc.

The ideal switch for this woudl be a hydrogen thyratron (5C22 or equivalent) .

A paper showing fusion in deuterated fibers was definitively accomplished back in 1972 is avaialble for cash money at....

http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v29/i9/p568_1

The APS, Elsver and others keep the good stuff hidden to get good cash from the curious and well heeled.

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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Chris Bradley »

Richard Hull wrote:
> Ideas but no experiments, yet. ... Blowing up heavy water can get rather expensive as well at about 50 cents per cc.

Ideas, for sure.

What I had in my mind's eye was, say, a 0.5 to 1mm ID thick-walled nylon tube x 50mm, that you'd thread a wire in one end, to act as one electrode, and seal it, then syringe in (10 cents of) heavy water/mix in the top of the tube and seal that end with a wire too.
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by JohnCuthbert »

I wondered about a similar idea a while ago. Imagine silvering the inside of a glass tube then pulsing a very large current through the silver. The glass wouldn't let it go outwards ( for a while until the glass shattered) so the vapourised metal would be forced inwards. If the tube had low pressure deuterium in it I wondered if the heating and compression would generate fusion. At the time I figured that, even if it did, it would be almost impossible to prove because the electrical interference would make a conventional detector unworkable. A bubble detector might just show something. I guess it's another of those experiments I will do if I win the lottery.
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Doug Browning »

The issue that caught my attention with the Brillouin Energy setup was the current pulse they put right through the metallic (Pd) wire, which would produce abundant conduction electrons during the magnetic "pinch". Pinch is in quotes here because they are only using a 4 Amp peak 40 nS pulse through a .05 mm wire. (1 nF cap at 240.4 V) This would give 2000 A/mm2 in bulk, but due to the fast rise time and skin effect they calculate the current density at 10^9 A/cm2 though the surface layer. They only want to generate intense phonons for their hypothesized P+ plus e- to an N reaction.

My take on this is that if anything is going on there at all, it would more likely be a P+ plus e- plus P+ to 2D reaction, since that might avoid the 782 KeV barrier for a neutron and is energetically favored. (the lattice conduction electron conveniently getting in the way while the magnetic pinch "phonon" pushes them all together, this only occuring at a very small minority of the metal lattice locations holding the P+ or there would be a small explosion)

I'm sure by now that between ICF, MTF, MIF, and now MagLIF, some have covered a tiny imploding/exploding metallic tube with 2D inside. Their version of the Lawson criterion requires something like 3 grams/cm2 (product of density and radius) and typically near mega Ampere order pulsed current for the pinch. I'm not interested in re-doing their old results, but rather in determining if the metal lattice conduction electrons can provide any significant drop in the Coulomb barrier to fusion, which would translate into less pinch current needed. (This would then beat carbon tubes for containers)

An aside:
Even in the Fusor, most of the reactions are apparently occuring with neutral D atoms or molecules being hit by high speed P+ or D+. Is the nearby electron assisting sometimes?

Brillouin Energy says their setup works with ordinary water as well (but maybe better with D2O). Plain water would be cheap enough. And only needs the outer surface of the Pd wire infiltrated with P or D reactants according to them. Their theory paper:
http://www.brillouinenergy.com/Docs/Bri ... thesis.pdf

So at some current pulse level, maybe up to 10,000 to 100,000 Amps for .05 mm wire, does one of these loaded wires begin to produce Neutrons and Gamma Rays per the conventional fusion picture. (DIY capacitor bank discharge with maybe a big Mosfet array switch) Or does it start at some much lower current level due to some electron assisted Coulomb barrier reduction? And WTH is going on at just 4 Amps that they are seeing alleged heat evolution with no radiation? Could the barrier reduction be THAT good?

Would be nice to use something cheaper than Pd wire. Brillouin ... says Ti or Ni or W wire will work too (but I don't see where they have tested that, just some of their theory projection). I would think that the wire has to at least absorb the P+ or D+ nuclei within the metal lattice vacancies.

Earlier comments in the other thread:
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=7657#p55500
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Richard Hull »

You can rule out any assistance from P+ or e- to make D in any earth bound effort. It just ain't gonna happen! P-P fusion just can't be done here for any purpose. As such, you can't synthesize D unless it is ash from a higher Z destruction process which is also unlikely in an amateur effort.

In amateur hands, P+ and e- are kinetic disintegrators (bullets) and not fusion items by normal physics. Even then, we never see them at kinetic energies where even disentegration of other products is possible.

We need to stick with D-D fusion here which is possible. We also need to keep this as a possible experimental post and not deal with a lot of alternate bizarre theories that are and will remain untestable by experiment here. I don't want this to "devolve" and degenerate into a theoretical discussion. Nuts and bolts only, please.

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Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Doug Browning »

Well, Brillouin Energy says their thing works with just plain vanilla P as well as D (ie, ordinary water versus heavy water electrolyte for loading the wire). That would seem to be a big plus for the experimental practicality.

I realise that P+ plus P+ fusion has a high Coulomb barrier and would not be happening here. But could you tell me why an electron positioned between them (the P's), with zero angular momentum with respect to the P's, could not lower the Coulomb barrier? I realize the statistics of this happening are unlikely, but the experiment does involve large numbers of conduction electrons and only a few reactions result apparently (for the Brillouin case anyway).

Normally I would expect the electron would become an orbital around one or both of the nuclei (whichever is closer), but if it has zero angular momentum available and is equally spaced between, it would be limited to an orbital which passes thru the nuclei, which would still seem to be helpful at lowering the Coulomb repulsion. Conduction electrons always have some linear momentum, so maybe they cannot be trapped in a zero angular momentum orbital? The external collective "phonon" may be the key in removing that momentum issue here so the electron can settle in. Seems to be what Brillouin Energy is saying. Presumeably, the lattice shifts so as to match momentum with the conduction electron.

The conditions for this hypothetical Coulomb barrier lowering effect are obviously dependent on extremely precise initial conditions, which would be statistically unlikely, (impossible in a plasma) except for the fact that the metal lattice provides ga-zillions of identical test cases. If the lattice, reactant and current pinch conditions are all set up "correctly", I would expect there would be a temperature dependence as thermal motion disrupts the ideal conditions. So any reaction peak versus current say, should become more sharp and higher magnitude as the temperature decreases.
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Carl Willis »

I agree with Richard that we need to stay focused.

The Brillouin company hasn't made ANY scientific disclosures about anything at all, as far as I can tell. When they talk about their apparatus working with protons and go on to present a theory for it, we need to recognize that, just like the Rossi crew and countless other contemporaries in the business of tech-sensationalism, (1) they are referring to a phenomenon that is proprietary, effectively inscrutable to the outside world, and may not even exist; and (2) the theory offered in support isn't consistent with established physics, but more fundamentally is irrelevant because the phenomenon itself remains cryptic.

I don't mind if people take inspiration for a real experiment from the material or procedural motifs hinted at in the world of tech-sensationalism (or science fiction, or "steampunk," or any other cultural reservoir). But I intent to keep this forum immaculately free of physically-unsupported speculation, sycophancy, link-dropping, name-dropping, and theoretical musings from that sphere. We're an "open-source" amateur science forum.

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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Doug Browning »

I see your point on endless speculation. But it should still be useful to have some idea of what to expect result-wise from the experiment for the measurement setup.

After some more thoughts, I am seeing significant problems with the idea of conduction electron mediation of the fusion Coulomb barrier in this pinched wire configuration. The pinch forces are at right angles to the direction of conduction electron travel, so mechanical forces (or phonons) will not be able to bring the lattice motion into synchrony with the conduction electrons ( to fine tune out angular momentum of e orbitals around/thru the reactants). And the current conduction pathes through the palladium lattice forms frames AROUND the easy motion pathes for the 1H or 2D reactants, rather than intersecting them. So this hypothetical mode is likely statistically eclipsed, except maybe for some lattice flaws.

Looking thru some of the old CF literature I did however come across something of interest for a current pinched wire configuration experiment (for the case of deuterium loading anyway) as under consideration. An early proposal for a radiation free CF reaction was the Oppenheimer-Phillips effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppenheime ... ps_process
Which pulls a neutron off of a Coulomb polarized deuterium nucleus.

Apparently this was ruled out as occuring at too low a reaction rate for CF effects. One would also need to verify that it is energetically favorable for Palladium or Nickel , Ti ... etc. wire for it to proceed here. I hope to find the original paper(s) applying this to CF. They may not have considered a pinch effect shock wave COMBINED with the Op-Ph effect to enhance it's reaction rate. One would expect the pinch forces required here to be significantly less than for the usual inertial/pinch fusion schemes (a significantly reduced Coulomb barrier now). This could put it in range for DIY efforts. I would be rather surprised if it got down to anywhere near as low as 4 amps though. But a cap discharge at 10,000 Amps?

If this effect is significant here, then the reaction products would be an additional neutron added to the metal atoms (nucleus). Charged protons being the high energy product, their energy would mostly be absprbed by the metal lattice (wire) as heat, but a few would escape from surface reactions (detectable hopefully if not immersed in electrolyte, ie. final pinch done in vacuum). So quite a different set of reaction products to look for.

This effect is especially interesting since it solves the hardest part to swallow of the CF phenomena, no radiation or He products. And would change the emphasis on how to make the reaction proceed effectively. Of course, this would not be real fusion either. But it could be a means to getting high energy protons for further reaction uses or direct conversion instead of thermal conversion for a nuclear battery.
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Richard Hull »

Don, I think you are all over the place again with wild theory that hasn't the science behind it and certainly no experiment performed here for critical review.

Again let's keep this about a possible exploding wire experiment and not about what we think we might find or a causitive agent, since we have found nothing, (no experiment yet), and thus, no need to explain any results.

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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Doug Browning »

I have to respectfully disagree. Oppenheimer-Phillips theory is well worked out, available in the literature, and can be readily merged with at least static Pinch induced pressure.

Some of the subtleties of dynamic shock waves may be a stretch, granted. Probably not a factor for just surface absorbed 2D reactions though.

One will need a sensitive electron multiplier RGA to analyze the vaporized wire residuals to see any isotope shift effects if this occurs. (deuterium changed to 1H, the biggest clue, but difficult to differentiate from background unfortunately, and the metal wire isotope increased by a neutron if it's stable) (One might try to feed deuterium into the turbo vent port to reduce 1H background I suppose, along with a thorough bakeout. Expensive though. One could possibly put two turbos in series to reduce the required deuterium leak/vent rate, if no hydrogen leaks off the turbo motor wire enamel.)

Even conventional fusion results would benefit from an RGA of course.
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Chris Bradley »

Richard Hull wrote:
> Don, I think you are all over the place again with ...no experiment performed here for critical review.

Don Bowen wrote:
> I have to respectfully disagree.

How can you disagree with that statement!? Show us the experiment, then!

If you had, even, some even-slightly related experimental experience to illustrate your reply, that could help us understand where you're coming from....
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Doug Browning »

I've never heard of anyone doing experiments without some ideas as to what the expected results were. How can you know what to measure for? Who would fund such endeavers? If I already had such results in hand, I wouldn't be offering them in public for DIY, I would be off to the patent attorney.

There is no "rocket science" in increasing the pressure term (from the Pinch effect) in the Oppenheimer-Phillips equations. This effect was already proposed as a cause of CF effects long ago, it just didn't make the numbers. I didn't invent it.

The electron mediation of the Coulomb barrier idea also was an old idea proposed for CF explanation:
Hagelstein, Peter L.; Michael, McKubre; Nagel, David; Chubb, Talbot; Hekman, Randall (2004) (PDF), New Physical Effects in Metal Deuterides, Washington: US Department of Energy, http://web.archive.org/web/200701061851 ... ndix_1.pdf

I did speculate on what the Pinch effect might do for that, but I now realize it is unlikely to help.
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Chris Bradley »

So, are you disagreeing with something you thought Richard said, or something he *actually* said?

Don Bowen wrote:
> If I already had such results in hand, I wouldn't be offering them in public for DIY, I would be off to the patent attorney.


Best to re-consider what the nature of this 'open source - amateur experimental' forum means, then...
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Doug Browning »

I am disagreeing with:
"I think you are all over the place again with wild theory that hasn't the science behind it and certainly no experiment performed here for critical review."

I didn't invent the theory, there are journal papers on it:

Oppenheimer, 1995, page 192 cf. Note on the transmutation function for deuterons, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Melba Phillips, Phys. Rev. 48, September 15, 1935, 500-502, received July 1, 1935.

J. Robert Oppenheimer (1995). Alice Kimball Smith, Charles Weiner. ed. Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections (reimpressed, illustrated ed.). Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804726205, 9780804726207

and it is based on prior experimental results:
"considering experiments with the Berkeley cyclotron showing that some elements became radioactive under deuteron bombardment.[2]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppenheime ... ps_process

It's not all over the place, it was proposed early on as a means to explain CF results (no He or radiation), but it didn't work out numerically big enough. I just added Pinch pressure for making the equation numbers better.

"An early explanation invoked the Oppenheimer–Phillips process at low energies, but its magnitude was too small to explain the altered ratios.[150]"
"Huizenga, John R. (1993), Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century (2 ed.), Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-855817-1"
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion"

And the reason I have been posting has been in the spirit of open DIY. But if that is not appreciated, I will remove myself. It is becoming all too clear why no progress occurs in the fusion field.
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Carl Willis »

The defining pathology of the cold-fusion camp is once again on display: lopsided attention paid to theorizing a mechanism for phenomena that are not qualitatively established and stand a good chance of not even existing. It's like proposing a gastroenterological or psychosocial explanation for why Sasquatch poop is not found on the forest floor: a phenomenon is assumed to exist, and people then take a flypaper approach to theoretical accommodation. Ideas are flung around willy-nilly to see what sticks.

So it's a reaction with deuterium that produces no neutrons. Aha, they say, must be stripping (Oppenheimer-Phillips), despite there being no other basis for that proposal and certainly no basis in conventional nuclear physics. But no tritium is found. So OP falls off the flypaper. Aha, they say, must be successive neutron capture that produces helium, once again without any foundation. But no gamma rays are found, so that falls off the flypaper and they try to get something else to stick. "Aha! Electron capture!" All these clowns use the language of established physics, but betray fundamental misunderstanding of it at every turn. All the while a raft of supposed phenomena await even basic phenomenological description. Now what was it you were saying about a lack of progress?

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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Doug Browning »

I am not, nor have I at any time been defending CF or LENR or whatever. I am generally quite sceptical of the area. I will say I admire the courage and tenacity of some of the practitioners, but I do not see much hope there. But good luck to them, and I would certainly welcome any approach that successfully does produce energy without radiation or even without a thermal cycle.

Oppenheimer-Phillips doesn't produce any tritium (at least not with Palladium as I was suggesting?), I don't follow what you are suggesting there, unless you are saying deuterium + deuterium via O-P, which clearly doesn't make any sense ( the second reactant needs a stronger affinity for the neutron). There was no intentional pinch effect present either with early CF. And the O-P effect did not numerically support CF, I would consider it as one more count against CF.

I was merely saying that the Pinch effect pressure on a wire loaded with deuterium could enhance the rate numbers for an O-P effect between 2D and palladium. Or looking at it from another angle, one would expect to see some kind of results from an O-P lowered barrier before reaching sufficient pinch currents to do full blown D+D fusion. So instead of the 70 MegaAmpere currents required at Sandia, something interesting might be seen at 10,000 Ampere currents using DIY capacitor discharges.

The combination of a meaningful pinch effect with a deuterium loaded wire is apparently something of a new area, and it would seem worthwhile to explore any effects that might be relevant. Whether they were tried on and didn't fit for CF is really irrelevant.
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Carl Willis »

What I am saying is that detailed theories for cold fusion are unscientific, premature because the phenomenon lacks publicly-accepted definition and because many claimed instances plausibly don't even exist.

This thread was about how one might look for fusion (in the standard DD sense) in an exploding wire. Standard, scientifically-accepted, DD fusion that has an easily-detectable neutron yield.

Yet for some reason, you insist on stuffing the thread with speculative explanations for hypothetical observations that are all part of the unscientific "cold fusion" mythos. I will not let that camel's nose into this tent.

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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Doug Browning »

D+D pinch fusion in the wire will require enormous currents, well beyond what DIY techniques can muster. There are straight forward calculations in the Sandia papers on what it will take (no burn wave, just volume compression mode in a small wire). Only if there is some reason to expect lower pinch current effects would one even bother with this experiment.

Heaven forbid if someone ever suggests that CF is caused by plasma physics! No more ITER.

I will lay off on the CF "mythos", due to the apparent irritation it seems to cause, it was just a convenient research area to find some effects that might be relevant. If there are any other processes that might give interesting effects at lower pinch currents than the Sandia level (other than melting the expensive wire), I for one would still be interested in hearing about them.
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by hjerald1 »

Richard,
This concept is related to the approach of using explosively compressing UD3 in order to provide "trigger" neutrons for fission weapons. It has been postulated (by those not privy to classified information), that this technique is used by (at least) the US, Pakistan, and China in current nuclear weapons.

Apparently there is an open source publication by the Chinese describing the technology:

"Fusion Produced by Spherical Explosive", in Shock Compression of Condensed Matter 1989. Proceedings of the American Physical Society Topical Conference Held in Albuquerque, NM August 14-17, 1989; Schmidt, SC; Johnson, JN; Davidson, LW; Eds. 1990.

One can imagine that the exploding wire approach has also been looked at by (and classified by) nuclear weapons groups in a number of countries.

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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by hjerald1 »

A Google search reveals publications concerning neutron production via exploding wires of metal deuterides.

I have wondered for some time about the use of electromagnetic forming or “magneforming” via high power pulsed magnetic fields to promote D-D fusion in metal deuteride targets. Amateurs have used pulsed magnetic fields to produce shrunken coins and the internet reveals numerous approaches to building equipment which could be adapted to metal deuteride experiments.

But Google again provides references to neutron production from applying pulsed magnetic fields to various deuterides.

It is quite likely that both technologies have been examined in detail by nuclear weapons researchers as part of efforts to develop alternate methods of neutron production for fission weapon initiators (including UD3 mentioned in my earlier post).

However it would be fun for the Fusor community to use their collective neutron detection capability and examine either of these approaches.

Jerry
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Edward Miller »

UD3 is VERY interesting. Tough space for the amateurs, tread lightly.

[Edit: Added this part]
I wonder if a similar hydride might be made with non-fission elements that would still see the benefits of this configuration. Also I wonder what their input is in order to produce neutrons with UD3. FWIW there is a scientist that was loading up palladium metal with deuterium using electrolysis and hitting it with a decent laser that was getting good results. Not a significantly closer to break even but interesting. I'll find his paper....

From what I've found briefly DT trigger outputs are 10E8 in 100 ns pulse. That seems small.
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Re: Fusion in an exploding, (imploding) wire?

Post by Edward Miller »

The only thing more interesting than reading about fusion is reading about how people have tried a variety of fusion initiators to ignite fission explosions. The comments run the same range of detail and crazy as our own fusor board. Interestingly enough though it does seem that pulsed D2 tubes are used as initiators...

http://forden.armscontrolwonk.com/archi ... ed-herring
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