New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

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Pierre Moss
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Real name: Pierre Moss

New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

Post by Pierre Moss »

Greetings all,

I have patented a novel method of magnetic confinement fusion that has caught the attention of DARPA who has shown great interest in possibly funding further research of the concept. Since I am a lone amateur physicist not tied to a university or research project, and the only people who are aware of my new concept are a few physicists within DARPA and ARPA-E, and I wanted to share this concept.

The main reason that DARPA has been interested in this new concept is that this new method of confinement may be able to tie the connection between fusion and gravity by possibly having the gravitational force directly linked to confinement of like-charged particles, mainly electrons, under the attractive effects of converging geodesic deviations that repulse against each other creating a plurality of potential voids relative to a single relative center point. In addition, DARPA thought that my slide presentation that explains how the sun flips its magnetic fields every 11years was very interesting as well. I will include these two slide presentations along with the general confinement concept.

To date, I personally have not yet simulated the device but the project manager at DARPA, who is still interested in this concept, received proposals from three different companies to do the 3D simulations around this time last year. After possibly allocating funds for the simulation, the project manager has reached out monthly/bi-monthly to let me know they are still interested in the concept and are hoping to possibly place some funding into it the concept once funds are available. Besides that, they have not given me any details of the possible simulations that may have gone on.

It is for this reason that I am building a rudimentary tabletop version of this device to test the electron confinement capabilities that should be ready for testing in the next month or so. Once it is done, I will post the results. The main reason I started building the tabletop, is because DARPA has been so vague on the possible simulations that may have already occurred or when they are planning to place funding towards the concept.

If the presented slides pique your interest, I also have a website that reviews these concepts covered in the patent at fusionandgravity.com. Thanks for your time, and I look forward to your thoughts and comments on this new method of magnetic confinement.

Very Respectfully,

Pierre
Attachments
Pole Flips in Sun's Core.pdf
How the Sun Flips its Magnetic Poles
(467.62 KiB) Downloaded 459 times
Quantum Gravity thru Particle Shaping Latest (1).pdf
Expanded Theory of Gravity
(585.76 KiB) Downloaded 395 times
NESAR Fusion Concept FULL.pdf
Fusion Concept
(882.05 KiB) Downloaded 445 times
Patrick Lindecker
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Re: New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

Post by Patrick Lindecker »

Hello Pierre,

I read your interesting paper "The nuclear...(NESAR)". It's a good idea to introduce a moment of force on particles, to make them turn. By this way, you will probably reduce the rate of particles losses through the cusps, which will increase the confinement time.

However it will be, in my opinion, very difficult to reach a density of ions compatible with a production of electricity application, let's say a density of 5E-19 ions/m3, due to space charge.
The problem with that sort of apparatus is that you can't, of course, plan to reach neutrality. So you are going to just inject ions attracted by the electrons cloud. The result will be very poor, both for the density of fusion power and mechanical gain Q (perhaps one or two orders better than Fusors, but still far below a Q of 1). Moreover, supposing central collisions between ions (so for an ideal center of mass energy of 65 keV), the potential of the electrons cloud might be elevated to retain these ions (65 keV minimum and more if you take into account ions thermalization).

However, for applications using yet linear fusors to produce neutrons, your device could be a very interesting progress.

Note that your text about Tokamak is not clear: the poloidal field initiated by the plasma current twists the magnetic field so as to avoid drifts leading to a loss of particles on the wall. It works well : look at the KSTAR reactor with a confinement time of 20 s. The big problem (not solved yet) of tokamaks is the disruptive instabilities induced by this forced plasma current (so stellarators have not this problem).

>I have patented a novel method of magnetic confinement fusion
Is it possible to patent a concept in USA? It is not permitted in France (and perhaps in Europe), where you must show a "proof of concept".

Regards
Patrick Lindecker
Pierre Moss
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Re: New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

Post by Pierre Moss »

Patrick,

Thank you so very much for taking time out of your schedule to look at this new concept. I noticed you live in France, I have visited the country a few times when I was in the NAVY. It is a beautiful country and I hope to go back in the next couple of years. When I was in France, I spent most of my time in Nantes and Brest. Hopefully, next time I am there I will stop by Paris. If you are wondering where my French name came from, it is passed down from my grandfather who named my dad Pierre after his best friend, who was French, who died in WWII.

First of all, thanks for recognizing the novelty in this approach to magnetic confinement. I understand the concerns of maintaining a density high enough to meet neutrality. The density of the confines is possibly the greatest concern of mines as well, and one of the biggest factors that I am considering on the possible success of this device is the appropriate angle of the coils to push the confines in a way that maximizes the density while rotating. Since plasma has a mind of its own, I am hoping that my tabletop can shed some light on the possible capabilities of this device or possible design changes in the approach to this concept in the next month or so.

I realized that my slides did not go into much detail on the failure of the Tokamak being mainly tied to the poloidal fields, sorry about that. When I started learning about how Tokamak fails due to magnetic reconnection issues, I also learned that there was not a detailed theory of how magnetic reconnection occurs. Basically specialists in the field of study only goes into detail that it occurs when inflows of opposing directed magnetic fields push against each other to merge/reconnect; causing an immense outflow force. Since there was no law on how this happens, I studied how it occurs on a stellar size and realized that the phenomena only happen when the field loop is forced upon itself. This field loop merging with itself causes the opposing field lines to reconnect, which makes sense since field lines from different loops or dipole fields will never cross each other and merge because the field likes are of different field density properties. But when the same loop field is forced upon its own field lines with the same field line properties is able to merge/reconnect. I will attach a more detailed write-up of what I am talking about on magnetic reconnection.

I know this magnetic reconnection concept is a theory of mines, but when I start studying the Tokamak years ago I realized the reconnection issues happen the same way in it as it does in stellar observations. They call this failure in Tokamaks a Sawtooth failure. They never say it's due to the poloidal field’s current running parallel with the confined charged particle current, but it is obvious to know that parallel current moving in the same direction will attract, and the only current that is not fixed/mounted is the confined charged particles. This causes the confines to be pulled towards the outer wall of the vacuum chamber. As that attraction occurs as the current increases, the increasing change in current causes an induced current that is oppositely driven that gets pinched between the attractive inflow fields of the poloidal coils and the main confines of the plasma. They have known about this since the early 90’s and have done little to correct it until the early 2010’s with the KSTAR.

The reason the KSTAR is doing better than all of the other Tokamaks is that it is the first, I think, to incorporate Edge-localized modes (ELMs) to mitigate the reconnection issues, by trying to use the ELMs to push the confines away from the vacuum wall by using more magnets. Problem is that this is a complicated system that uses much more energy to control and monitor the confines, which means much harder to get outputs at a greater magnitude compared to what energy is put in. I know the KSTAR has met a great milestone, but I don’t believe that they will be able to stop the destructive reconnection issues enough to be commercially usable. LOL, I don’t know if you can tell, but I am not a fan of Tokamaks and I believe they are a big waste of resources when approaching a solution for sustainable fusion. I will attach a depiction of the ELM magnets for those who may not know what they are.

I am hoping that the NESAR can perform similarly to a tokamak, without the magnetic reconnection issues since the poloidal currents are taken out of the equation. In general, I am hoping that the NESAR will be able to recirculate similarly to a tokamak, but relative to a single location instead of a long ring-shaped tube which should require much less energy to confine the charged particles allowing for possible sustainable fusion at a small scale. Rotating the particles relative to a single point should allow for a strong dipole field to be created by the confined charged particles within the confines that should allow for much greater protections against magnetic reconnection issues; as the induced field will not be forced upon itself.

With that being said I do believe that the Stellarator is a much better approach to sustainable fusion when compared to Tokamaks. They don’t have the poloidal fields that pull the confines towards the confine walls and their odd design is mainly to allow for the charged particles to drift, move in their natural motion, in the ring with minimal confinement energy needed. Out of the best-known currently approaches to fusion, I think this is the most effective. The only issue I have with the stellarators is that the design has to be a certain size to account for the particle drift, which means they will more than likely have to be at a certain size to operate.

As for your question “Is it possible to patent a concept in the USA?”, I think it is. I wrote this patent myself and submitted it through a law firm. The only thing the firm did was refined and submitted it. From my experience, this is the best way to do your patents. The cost was only about $1,500 instead of the typical $15,000 to $25,000 to do a patent like this. Also, if anyone has questions about doing your own US patent, I have created my own templates needed to do them if anyone is interested. Sorry to digress, but hopefully it will be awarded in the next few months since the initial review by the USPTO only had a couple of issues with the details on the noncritical figures. They are not contesting the novelty or validity of the claims, which is good. My lawyer and I will be responding in the next week or so to hopefully have this done and fully awarded.

Thanks again for your time in reviewing the concept, your thoughts are greatly appreciated and hopefully I will be able to share more soon from the tabletop experiments.

Very Respectfully,

Pierre
Attachments
Stellarator
Stellarator
ELMs
ELMs
Poloidal Field Main Cause of Tokamak Failure.pdf
Poloidal Magnetic Reconnection in Tokamaks
(303.02 KiB) Downloaded 383 times
My Observations of Magnetic Reconnection-7.pdf
Magnetic Reconnection Observations
(955.59 KiB) Downloaded 405 times
Patrick Lindecker
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Re: New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

Post by Patrick Lindecker »

Hello Pierre,

Thanks for the way to patent a concept and all the information and documents about magnetic reconnection (problem that I ignored until yesterday☺). It seems to apply to the sun, and to astronomical phenomena.

I agree that Stellarators are, a priori, a better solution than tokamaks. However if you look at the confinement time of the Wendelstein 7-X, it is rather bad: 0.2 sec, 10 times smaller that the one of a modern tokamak! In their document, they consider it as very well as it complies to their prediction, but it remains bad. With 0.2 sec, there is no hope to have a high Q. I don't know the reason of such difference. Perhaps, have you an idea?

Regards
Patrick
Justin Fozzard
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Re: New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

Post by Justin Fozzard »

High-order multipoles or "surmacs" (SURface Magnetic Confinement), were extensively investigated in the 1960s and 70s.

One device had a spherical arrangement of electromagnets very similar to yours; the Kaktus-Surmac:
Kaktus-Surmac Concept.jpg

Here are some further references that include information about similar devices:

Sadowski 1981 High-order spherical magnetic multipoles for surface confinement of plasma
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1061387

Dolan 1977 Review of Electrostatic Plugging
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/7297331

Roth 1978 Alternative Approaches to Plasma Confinement
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4317127

EPRI ER-429-SR Alternative Concepts in Controlled Fusion Part A Executive Summaries
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5318837

Dolan 1994 Magnetic Electrostatic Plasma Confinement
https://www.scribd.com/document/4285802 ... onfinement

Chen 1979 Alternate concepts in magnetic fusion
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/ ... /1.2995552
Pierre Moss
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Re: New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

Post by Pierre Moss »

Patrick,

You are correct about the poor run times for the stellarators, I have not studied them as extensively as I have the tokamak, but I do know that they are constantly tweaking the confining magnets to match particle drift patterns. I am guessing they have not gotten the magnetic pattern completely right yet. I have a buddy that is currently working on a stellarator being built here in the states, at Wisconsin, I may have to reach out to him and ask that question. If I can get a straight answer on that, I will let you know.

Very Respectfully,

Pierre
Pierre Moss
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Re: New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

Post by Pierre Moss »

Justin,

Good Morning. Noticing that you are from Essex, England. As a NAVY man, I think the closed I have been to your location has been Portsmouth, England for a month or so. I definitely miss the stouts and porters from there.

This is pretty cool. I have never come across the Kaktus-Surmac and these alternative fusion concepts. It is interesting that they initially wanted to use permanent magnets because that is what I originally wanted to use years ago until I learned that permanent magnets lose their effectiveness around 80 Celcius/ 175ish degrees Fahrenheit. After I came up with the initial concept for this reactor, based up the design of our sun; I discovered and learned mainly about the polywell. It was invented by Robert Bussard, in the early 80s. I thought that this was the only device that was somewhat similar to my concept that also had a spherical variant in its patent. I will definitely dive into these other alternative concepts to fusion more.

For my NESAR device, the idea that is novel is not so much the shape, but its use of angled coils/magnets off-center to push a rotation of charged particles about a relative, instead of a direct, magnetic field center. In a sense, I am trying to create a virtual singularity of focus for fusion and possible gravitation.

Thanks again for taking the time to look at this concept, what you provided is extremely interesting and I can’t wait to read more into what you provided.

Very Respectfully,

Pierre
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Joe Gayo
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Re: New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

Post by Joe Gayo »

Wow, Justin. Great references.

Roth, J. R. (1978). Alternative Approaches to Plasma Confinement. IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, 6(3), 270–295. doi:10.1109/tps.1978.4317127 reinforces what we know, a large array of concepts were built and tested in the 60-70s. Nothing new under the Sun.
Justin Fozzard
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Re: New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

Post by Justin Fozzard »

I tried posting the pdf papers that I cited into the files section, but they are too big; mostly over 10MB.
I would be happy to put them on a communal google drive or similar if someone can set it up.
Last edited by Justin Fozzard on Tue Jan 05, 2021 3:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Joe Gayo
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Re: New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

Post by Joe Gayo »

they can be viewed on scihub
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Richard Hull
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Re: New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

Post by Richard Hull »

I'm not saying every seemingly good idea related to fusion has already been tried, 1952-2021, but all those that were good enough to be fully tested in hardware, have failed miserably. I just heard that the ITER debacle is now estimated to cost 93 billion euros when it is done. 2025 is ITERs first supposed turn on date. Assuming it will go over unity for an unspecified run period, they note that they expect 10X efficiency to be achieved in 2035. 50 MW in 500MW out! Such a deal for only 93 billion of the money. If 2035 works out, DEMO is next and will actually produce electricity that WILL NOT be distributed to the public. Assuming all I have written comes to fruition, they expect power fusion distribution might be possible by 2070. This assumes a stable world for the next 50 years with continued, uninterrupted work on ITER then DEMO proceeding apace, flawlessly.

Good luck with all of this. The bean counters are then brought to bear at the power companies...Can we build a fusion reactor that will pay for itself? Will the public pay our determined price point? Then comes the ever present....Will there be a significant profit for us to do it? Sadly, if the public consumer price rate goes to $12.82per KWh how many will say "screw that!... Come and disconnect me, Mr. power company!"

For anything discussed in this thread to even reach the baseline testing stage, some powerful people in both the science and investment arenas will have to think the idea is just the prettiest thing they have seen on all fronts. Until then, it is not even a theoretical construct. It is just an idea, thrown out there. If not taken up in a serious and testable manner, it will join many hundreds of other ideas that didn't even make honorable mention. It is important to remember that many ideas that have, indeed, looked really pretty, did actually reach the full testing stage with the blessings of the scientific community and are now on the trash heap of officially failed, tested fusion efforts with billions in the treasure now gone.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
Patrick Lindecker
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Re: New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

Post by Patrick Lindecker »

Hello Pierre,

>I have a buddy that is currently working on a stellarator being built here in the states, at Wisconsin, I may have to reach out to him and ask that question. If I can get a straight answer on that, I will let you know.
Thanks to forward the question. It could be of interest to know why with the same basic principles (a toroidal + a poloidal magnetic fields obtained in obvioulsly different ways), the confinement has not at all the same quality. 0.2 sec of confinement time is a big escape of particles... Perhaps the Divertor extracts much more impureties (and so ions) on Stellarators. I read in this indispensable book "Project Sherwood" by Amasa S. Bishop (my only regret is that it covers only 1951 to 1959) that impureties was a real drawback for the first stellarators and prevent them to rise in temperature.

Let us also inform to your progress on your concept. In all cases, it can be of interest.

Regards
Patrick (and also "Pierre" for my second first name ☺)
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Dennis P Brown
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Re: New Method of Magnetic Confinement that has Received Some Interest from DARPA

Post by Dennis P Brown »

If you can get basic funding to work on some of the ideas then you have certainly crossed a milestone that really few outside major labs can say.

AS for ideas that might work, again, as you also pointed out the stellarator is certainly in that class and the Germans have made amazing progress (on plasma density/storage times) unlike tokamaks (that's you ITER and MIT.)

But do follow your ideas and try to get funding. Best of luck!
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