J.A.N.K.O Neutron Club Application + POV Video

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Anze A Ursic
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J.A.N.K.O Neutron Club Application + POV Video

Post by Anze A Ursic »

I've described my fusor in a previous post (viewtopic.php?t=14872), but I am finally applying to the neutron club. For reference, the experiments with the spherical grid were conducted on October 7th 2022, while some custom ring grid experiments were conducted on October 10th 2022 (more on that in another post). I've since had many things to do, including moving, getting a new job and so on, so I am only now getting around to applying to the neutron club. I have done my due dilligence and have read the rules for claiming fusion, so I hope I have covered all bases here.

The chamber is already described in the other post, but for reference, I am attaching two figures here as well with some stuff highlighted to get an idea how everything worked. A picture of my remote control setup is also attached here.

CHAMBER 1.png
CHAMBER PHOTO 2.png
operation.jpg

DESCRIPTION OF OPERATION

On to the good part, four runs were conducted on October 7th. The operation procedure went as follows:

1. Hours prior, the mechanical pump was turned on and pumped the system to roughly 1.5E-2 Torr. This was done with the manual gas flow valve and MKS MFC completely open but with the Deuterium bottle obviously shut off. This allowed for the entire chamber, including the gas feed lines, to be evacuated of air.

2. Then, the small turbo backing pump was turned on and it evacuated the turbo pump, which was connected to the vacuum chamber via a manual gate valve. At this point the manual valve was obviously shut completely. After a few minutes, the turbo was turned on and it ramped up to 1500 Hz. Once this was done, the manual gate valve was very slowly opened and the pressure dropped quickly. Right after this, the valve connecting the mechanical pump to the chamber was closed and the mechanical pump was turned off. Looking at the figure below, 5 minutes after opening the manual gate valve, the pressure dropped from 1.4E-2 to 8.0E-5 Torr.

PRESSURE SLIAK.jpg

3. Once pressure was in the low E-5's, I shut the manual gate valve almost completely to throttle the turbo and conserve gas, be it D2 or N2, or whatever... In any case, with such a large chamber, there was a lot of trial and error since closing the valve too much meant that there was a delay between stopping the flow of gas and the pressure dropping since the turbo was too throttled. This was dangerous for obvious reasons. If I accidentally added too much gas and the pressure started rapidly rising, shutting the gas flow completely led to a pressure drop only seconds later. Having the gate valve too open meant that the pressure barely rose even if I was dumping tons of gas into the chamber. Through trial and error, I found that shutting the valve until the pressure stabilized at around 4E-4 Torr was perfect. At that point, I got a plasma pressure (~13mTorr) at roughly 5SCCM of Deuterium flow (check previous post to see how I regulated deuterium flow).

4. Anyway, at 4E-4, the DF3 power supply was turned on and turned on from my remote control station. The minimum set voltage for this power supply was about 9kV, anything below gave you a "min. kV Error" on the front end. To counter this, the high voltage was enabled at these low pressures of 4E-4, and set to 12kV. The reasoning here is simple; since often when a plasma strikes, there is a runaway current condition, having that additional 3kV allowed me to ignite a plasma and, if needed, throttle it down quickly to avoid a runaway. This was mostly conditioned into my blood because of the previous chamber, which had severe leaking issues, so striking a plasma at 12kV was a highly violent and chaotic process and that voltage throttle-down was needed.

5. Once the voltage stabilized, I began opening up the MKS MFC with my DC power supply (previous post for details) and began increasing the flow of Deuterium until the pressure rose to 13mTorr. At that point, the live-view monitor displayed a beautiful plasma formation, and I began to balance the holy trinity of voltage, pressure and current. I kept increasing the voltage with my keyboard (each up-arrow press increased the voltage of the power supply by 100V) while lowering the flow of Deuterium.

6. I kept doing this until I got above 20kV. Then I kept doing the same thing but adding slightly more current to heat up my grid for some thermionic emission. At the end, fusion pressures were around 7-10mTorr, which can also be seen in the video.

Below are some visual results, the first picture I believe was around 15kV while the second was at 28kV.

picture 1.png
picture 2.png

RESULTS

A note; prior to doing a fusion run the safety office told me I have to show them that X-rays would not be a problem, so I used Nitrogen and got a plasma to get to 28kV, which was the highest the voltage could go before the little survey meter they were using would report 1.97mrem/hr right in front of the viewport. Because this was the first fusion device at Penn State, they told me the only applicable regulations they could apply here would be some accelerator regulations, which apparently limit the dosage of leaking X-rays to 2.00 mrem/hr into the "publicly-accessible" room or something. That in combination with the feedthrough being rated to only 30kV (electrical safety) limited us to only go up to 28kV.So they allowed me to achieve nuclear fusion, but with some caveats. The safety office giveth and the safety office taketh... All kidding aside, they were very flexible with all of this and incredibly kind. So shoutout to the Penn State safety people!

In any case, during testing, two neutron counters were used; one was a Eberline NRD Detector with a Ludlum 2241-2 survey meter attached while the other was a Bubbletech BD-PND I had bought myself on April 21st 2022. The BD-PND's sensitivity was 23b/mrem. Because roughly 6 months had passed between the detectors being shipped and me using them, 6 bubbles formed on their own as the detector was left alone in a closet, which, I was told by a Bubbletech representative, happens if you don't regularly compress / decompress them. In any case, I noticed the 6 bubbles around September 16th, meanwhile the experiment happened on October 7th and between this time no new bubbles formed. The representative told me it happens quite often and to just subtract the six bubbles from the final measurement. On October 7th four runs were done and the figure below shows the bubble dosimeter prior to, and after, all four experiments. About 4 hours between each picture.

TOTAL BEFORE AND AFTER.jpg

18 bubbles can be counted after, so a total of 12 bubbles were produced over a span of 4 runs. It is difficult to get a clear picture with all the bubbles, since there was usually glare and other optical stuff, but we determined the final number to be 18 on several counts.
This thread would become to long if I were to discuss each experiment in detail so I will quickly describe run 3, which is also shown on the video linked below. This experiment started as described above. The results are below:

3RD EXPERIMENT BUBBLE RESULTS.jpg

A net gain of 3 bubbles (11 to 14 - again, somewhat hard to see) was observed. The detector was placed 12.7cm away from the fusor grid center and the run time, the time spent above 20kV was 406 seconds, which can also be confirmed in the video below. The maximum voltage was 27kV and the approximate average current was 6.5mA. Plugging this into this online counter gives me an average of 1.82e4 neutrons/second.

GAMMA CALCULATOR.PNG

The results of all experiments are summarized in the table below. Note that a slight change in the table from the one appearing at the end of the video, it's because I miscounted the number of bubbles for experiment 2.

results table.PNG

The Eberline detector was not of much use for me on runs 1, 2 and 4 as it was used as a neutron detector at the operator area for runs 1 and 2 and it obviously didn't detect any neutrons near us, seeing as we were far away from the device, separated by lead shielding, concrete and ~4.5m of air. I did run 4 alone, without the safety personnel, and they had to take it with them. However, on run 3, I kindly asked them to place the Eberline NRD detector closer to the shell, which they allowed. I did not measure the distance but it was approximately 7-8" away from the fusor grid. On this run, a maximum of 0.6mR/hr was detected at some point close to the 27kV range. The video of the survey meter can be seen in the POV video at 14:13.

eberline neutron detector.PNG

With the two neutron detectors clearly showing some neutron production, no matter how small, the Environmental Health and Safety office declared that above-normal doses were recorded and thus neutrons were produced as a consequence of nuclear fusion. The following is now also official university record:

"October 7, 2022 saw the successful energization of a small fusion chamber using inertial electrical confinement and deuterium to achieve fusion in Electrical Engineering East. Neutron fields above background were detected, providing an indication of fusion. Note that elevated photon dose rates attributable to x-rays produced by the high-voltage equipment were also detected. Personnel monitoring was employed and showed 0 mrem whole body dose for the fusor operators."

During all four runs I wore a GoPro camera on my head and also recorded the fusor with my Sony videocamera. The Ludlum survey meter was also recorded. The three videos synced together can be seen via the link below (forgive me for saying stupid stuff, I was incredibly nervous during all of this):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-X7X5_kJGQ

I wish I was a bit more pedantic in data collection during my actual run, but I was incredibly nervous when conducting the experiment since the radiation safety officers only had a 1 hour time slot for this experiment and so if one thing went wrong (like it did go in previous experiments), they would have left and would have rescheduled the experiment for at least a week out, which I could not afford at the time since I was living on some guy's couch. However, I hope this post is informative, yet substantial enough for me to be admitted in the Neutron club. If more information is required, I will be glad to provide it to the best of my abilities.

Finally, a picture of me next to the chamber is needed as well from what I have read in the rules, but I hope this one will do. You cannot see the chamber, but I'm right next to it in this picture, which you can also cross-reference with the first chamber photo. I have one other picture with me and the chamber but there are other people in the picture as well, so I am not sure how comfortable they are with it being shared. I'll ask all of them if need be, let me know.

me.png

Let me state that while this was a solo project of five years, there have been several contributors without whom this would not have been possible. So Special thanks to Dr. Sven B., Dr. Vladimir G., John A. as well as the Penn State Health and Safety office and many others! Special thanks also goes to everyone here at the Fusor forums for fostering such a cool community.

Thank you!
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Jim Kovalchick
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Re: J.A.N.K.O Neutron Club Application + POV Video

Post by Jim Kovalchick »

I'm not the final judge, but I like your work. Well done!

Jim K
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Anze A Ursic
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Re: J.A.N.K.O Neutron Club Application + POV Video

Post by Anze A Ursic »

Thank you Jim! I patiently yet anxiously await Richard's verdict 🤣
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Richard Hull
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Re: J.A.N.K.O Neutron Club Application + POV Video

Post by Richard Hull »

Great work Anze! A minimal but real detection that fusion is taking place. I have added you to the neutron club listing.

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
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Anze A Ursic
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Re: J.A.N.K.O Neutron Club Application + POV Video

Post by Anze A Ursic »

Thank you, Richard! It means alot. It has been a goal of mine for half a decade. Appreciate all the help too!

Anze
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Emma Black
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Re: J.A.N.K.O Neutron Club Application + POV Video

Post by Emma Black »

Good work Anze a monument to dedication, congratulations! The photos of the plasma are also nice, it's interesting how they are mostly concentrated into a single beam. I wish you some happy fusing!
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Rich Gorski
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Re: J.A.N.K.O Neutron Club Application + POV Video

Post by Rich Gorski »

Anze,

Congrats on joining the neutron club! Looking forward to hearing more of your endeavors in fusion.

Rich G.
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Anze A Ursic
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Re: J.A.N.K.O Neutron Club Application + POV Video

Post by Anze A Ursic »

Thank you Rich and Emma,

Appreciate the support. I am no longer affiliated with the university as I have finished my Master's degree, so I will not be doing any more fusion on this system. I have passed the mantle to John A., who has also been posting on these forums lately. I still have some data to post here from another device I built, it's a more interesting design utilizing a cylidrical cathode array.

In any case, I will continue to work in the fusion field, either in industry or in the pursuit of a PhD. Either way, this is a field that is incredibly interesting to me, so being added to the fusion club means a lot.

Anze
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Dennis P Brown
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Re: J.A.N.K.O Neutron Club Application + POV Video

Post by Dennis P Brown »

Good work and congrats in getting into the neutron club. The bubble detection is the Gold Standard.
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Anze A Ursic
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Re: J.A.N.K.O Neutron Club Application + POV Video

Post by Anze A Ursic »

Thank you Dennis,

I appreciate all of your help in the past year as well!
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