Fusion Message Board

In this space, visitors are invited to post any comments, questions, or skeptical observations about Philo T. Farnsworth's contributions to the field of Nuclear Fusion research.

Subject: Re: Tesla Coil
Date: Oct 04, 08:06 am
Poster: Eugene Kopf

On Oct 04, 08:06 am, Eugene Kopf wrote:

>
>>Heat *is* kinetic energies on the ions. However, I think I understand what you are saying. You only wish to have the kinetic energy on one axis which is parallel to the the fusor radii.
>
> True, but you usually treat ion temperature and ion drift velocity seperately. This is because the temperature of an ion is measure in the frame of the average velocity of the particle. You want the magnitude of those random motions as small as possible.
>

Which was precisely what I mentioned bout being parallel to the radii vectors.

>>Shock waves would only be most notable well inside of the grid, where the constant bouncing back and forth through the center have already assumed a Maxwellian distribution, just as in the core of a star. IE, the kinetic energies are appearing as hot plasma. Any shock waves only only contribute to the effect. At the center, your are dealing with a tiny _thermo_nuclear reaction.
>
> The idea of a fusor, as I understand it, is to pull fusion *OUT* of the thermal space and into the velocity space, i.e. thermonuclear effects are bad news, interfere with the main show, and in general should be supressed for the sake of efficiency.
>
> -p
>

When the ions are bouncing through the center, their speeds or going to be somewhat different, due to drift, radiative effects, scattering collisions and other effects. Also, there is no one standard relative direction for the directions of the movements. Meanwhile, ions of various random speeds are popping into the center because of the grid and distruting their energies. Another random factor is whenever a fusion occurs, its resulting ions have random kinetic energy directions. Integrate these effects and you WILL have a Maxwellian distribution; it's precisely these sort of stochiastic distributions which are the fundaments of thermodynamics.

Unfortunately, any noticable fusion reaction in a plasma is going to shove itself to a Maxwellian distribution because of this.

That's not all bad. It allows relatively cool plasmas to undergo reactions because of the fact that the tail of the curve has sufficiently eneergetic reactions. It's not optimum, I'll agree, but few things in nature ever are.