Talk-Polywell.org

hanelyp brings up a good point. The idea of pure metal all around the coils is to ensure a uniform electric field. If you go from metal to insulator which would be necessary for the strips, the jump from metal to insulator will have a huge electric field. That will cause arcing, especially in a dens...

An outside insulated can would mean you need to put ground some where. An insulated surface would lead to something like the "plasma ball lamps" where you have arcs that wander all over the place. Only for a polywell device, the arcs would be capable of blowing holes through things. A uniform surrou...

You just have to keep scaling up the vacuum chamber, or start with a large enough chamber to fit all the coils for the dodec. If you can afford the vacuum pumps up front, it'd make sense to do all those experiments. But the larger the volume, the higher the cost of your pumps and other equipment. Fr...

I think you can put any number of coils around a center and have the field go to zero in the exact center (or if you get fancy, a couple of places). You don't have spherical symmetry though unless you have 4, 6 or 12 coils. How important that is remains unknown. My initial feeling was that symmetry ...

You are correct. "Center bore" means the axis around which the coil is wound. You are thinking center of the wire, which is a different "center"! The peak field along the axis in the center of a magnet is usually the most useful to work with. It tends to be more uniform, so approximations work well ...

Center bore is usually what it refers to. In a Helmholtz configuration it's the center between 2 coils. For an MRI machine, it's on axis center bore. Sticking with that makes the most sense (i.e. center of coil).

No, it takes a lot more energy to slam heavy nuclides. Here's an article that talks about a 265MeV cyclotron. With only a few keV for sources and 2MeV for alphas, there's no way to do that in a fusion reactor. It's kind of a difference between quantity (what you need for fusion) and quality (what yo...

Dig through the pdf's here for some core equations. Then just start asking questions!

All it really amounts to is continued funding with the stated requirements of better resolution on density measurements. Congrats to EMC2 - it is a sole source bid. It's pretty safe to assume the data will be collected at EMC2's present location.

I started working on it a while back and got some theory down, but I didn't have time to keep running with it. Way too many projects, and building real things is more fun than pure theory for me. But I have to go back to theory eventually because I'll want answers to things that I observe that don't...

Nanos wrote: Amusingly is the reason I cited when I resigned from my last government job, "I don't mind working with idiots, but I refuse to be ordered what to do by them."

darn that's good! I think I'll steal it!

Here is a great list of software and information on many packages. I've used GSL with excellent results, and have written my own code (with not enough time to debug it all fully....) Both Octave and ]url=http://www.scilab.org/]Scilab[/url] can do PDE's and they are Matlab look alikes. If you have a ...

At least you are in interesting company. Robert Anton Wilson is on the list too, and Paul Krassner used to write for "High Times". A "smoke filled room" with those guys would be a trip back to college!

It's hard to wrap my head around 2000kV plasma and superconducting emitter. I'd have to think about the electron states vs the lattice temperature, seems kinda hard to pull off.

Fascinating is definitely the correct term.

on the carbon nano wiki page of course!

Might not be totally accurate, but it's probably close enough.