Talk-Polywell.org

Diversified Tech has some extremely interesting power supply designs using IGBTs that look like they would be right up our alley for Polywell open source development. Somewhere in one of their technical papers they mentioned a cost of $100/kw for production quantities.
http://www.divtecs.com/

C'mon, guys. If you're going to do serious CAD, you have to spend some money. It's just the way the world works. In my job I use IronCad, which is the cheapest "full-feature " CAD system I know of. It's also the fastest and most intuitive to use. It makes Solidworks and ProEngineer look ridiculous, ...

One possible way to increase the cooling capacity of the system without increasing the cross sectional area might be to use the winding armature/support structure of the coils as a heat sink that is actively cooled externally to the vacuum vessel. I believe this idea has been used in spaceborne SC m...

That new MgB2 superconductor should be great for this app. I noticed the company that makes the wire supplies it in round section and in, I believe, kilometer-long continous lengths. I wonder how much wire we would need for a 4T, 3 meter diameter coil? It's ampere-turns that partially determine fiel...

Being a mechnical designer makes me look at these configurations from the standpoint of "how are you going to support these things?" Inside a vacuum tank. On megavolt standoffs. That support TONS of vectored forces trying to push them apart (or together, depending.) Through which you have to pass cr...

Interesting solid-state power supply technology for high voltage, high power applications (like magrids and superconducting magnets):
http://www.divtecs.com/index.htm

I was surprised to see that the University of Wisconsin has posted what appears to be EMC2's 26 page "confidential" paper on the results of the WB-6 experiments, as required reading material for one of their plasma physics courses. Does anyone know if they have permission to do this? Or is this old ...

MSimon, you said it. There's enough unknowns here to keep a whole "Bussard Institute for the Study of Polywell Physics" going for years and years!

From the cursory reading I've done on POPS, I thought power scales INVERESLY as the size, hence the reactor design consists of hundreds of small (cm-sized) reaction chambers oscillating in phase. Doesn't that directly oppose the Polywell power scaling law? When I listened to the interview, Dr. Bussa...

"Poly" refers to polyhedral, as in the geometric configuration of the B field coils.
The quasi-spherical negative potential well is formed by the combined fields of the individual coils, hence: "polywell".

...and if gain scales as the 5th power of the radius, just going from 1.5m to 2.0m radius will increase the gain by 1.33^5 or 4.2 times. Gain becomes 4.2 x 3.5 = 14.7!!!

I love this technology.

We do have Bussard's own estimates of a 100Mw net power machine's gain, in his "Clean Energy Future" summary. He writes: PROOF OF CLEAN FUSION POWER REQUIRES FULL SCALE TEST MACHINES (ca. 3 m DIAMETER, 40 MW DRIVE POWER, 15-25 kG MAGNETIC FIELDS, DRIVE ENERGIES UP TO 180 kV). If this is accurate, (a...

Cooling the magrid seems to be a topic that arises from time to time on this and other forums. I was wondering: how practical it would be to use a closed brayton cycle helium gas turbine like the ones proposed for next-generation fission plants, to generate power from the magrid cooling system? You ...

So, once the central virtual cathode is stabilised at a particular well depth, the well can be maintained at that depth just by ensuring that the electron losses are balanced by sufficient injected electron current? Does this square with the idea that the polywell system acts as a momentum transform...

This raises an issue I've been struggling with for some time, namely, how the well depth is determined by the machine parameters. I was initially under the impression that the electron guns impart the KeV necessary to accelerate the electrons to slightly more than the resulting potential well depth,...