Talk-Polywell.org

This sounds pretty sketchy. If you look at the abstract to this paper The energy release of 630 ± 30 eV corresponds to an interatomic distance D–D of 2.3 ± 0.1 pm. This material is probably an inverted metal with the deuterons moving in the field from the stationary electrons, which gives a predicte...

Hmm, from what I can tell, that Russian "galatea" sounds suspiciously like polywell, in that they involve current-carrying conductors passing through the plasma, and that they are an older design that's regaining attention. I'm having trouble finding any details, though.

Way to go, Tom!

Apparently the American Chemical Society magazine carried a story about this new cold fusion thing. Whoever claims this probably has good evidence, because they know what'll become of them if it turns out to be a mistake! Off-topic: Morgan: yeah, I find it rather depressing that it takes longer to b...

Good find! that's a nice read.

Washington! That's what I get for always being in a hurry. Waterloo, lol.

Well, I've gotten the OOPIC code working for me. I just coded up a simple xy slab model of an infinitely long set of 4 line cusps (kind of like a cross-section of a spindle cusp, but more like a toroidal cusp machine ala Tom Dolan). I'm getting mixed results, it's quite sensitive to the neutral gas ...

Ok, now I've gone and done it! I bought a student liscence for OOPIC Pro (a real bargain!) so now I have to learn how to use it. It looks really impressive though. I also need to figure out what would be most helpful to model. It has to be 2-D though. I'm thinking about doing a single point cusp in ...

Well, if we could hash out a plan for a simulation, there's a chance I could do that as my senior thesis! I've got some other possibilities (NSF internships I might be accepted to) but I'm trying to find a back up plan. If we could figure out a reasonably-sized project, I might just spend this summe...

... in which case, on my reading, they will impact the emitter instead. But I also see that I misread Tom's statement. The trouble with not allowing the electrons to impact the wall is that they have time to diffuse across the field and impact the magrid, which is a more serious energy loss (per ele...

Well, ok. There are likely to be both cold electrons oscillating in the cusp as well as fast electrons fresh from the electron injector. I suppose this may show my ignorance, but I'm not sure what the electron speed has to do with the ion distribution. That's what I was getting at. I'll see about do...

I agree that "beta=1" is ambiguous. I was thinking about your derivation in this thread where you assumed that the electron density times the electric field was the electric field energy density and set it equal to the magnetic field energy density. If the B-field and its energy density were higher ...

cold ions at the edge: my contention is that the electric potential in the cusp will be such that by energy conservation the ions in the cusp throat will be lower energy. I'm imagining the ion behavior being more or less collisionless I suppose. By "edge" do you mean cusp, or the entire sheath in ge...

Well, judging by the contract report, Dr. Nebel + Co. probably haven't measured beta yet, b/c the contract calls for B-field probes, IIRC. I suspect that the machine is not going to run at Beta=1 without some encouragement: if the cusp sheilding voltage and/or ion loss is too high, the plasma densit...

I think we agree with you on quasineutrality in the cusps. As to the applicability of the Bohm theory, the ions should be cold since the average ion temperature should be lower than the central potential by a handful of times. Thus the ions flowing through the point of maximum potential will be the ...