Talk-Polywell.org

Holy crap. roflmfao!! you got me!

@Tom Ligon: What kind of voltage would we be looking at to repell all electrons? If I'm right, you are saying that there will still be some impacts due to upscattered electrons having more energy than others, so the repelling potential will have to be larger than the average energy. But with enough ...

Well, but using objects probably increases overhead, and with a problem of this size I doubt we'll want that. In our case, it seems like we could probably sacrifice by making the coding a little trickier and save cycles on the cpu.

Interesting: I read a story on physorg.com that claimed that the 'wiki' approach to innovation (as opposed to institutional) had a disadvantage that people would tend to flock toward what seemed to be the best solution, and no-one would continue to work on less-seemingly promising ideas, some of whi...

Look, MSimon, this repeller idea would effectively cause recirculation by intensifying the electrostatic potential at the cusps so the electrons recirculate by being reflected back in through the cusps. You would have some losses to the ion screen, but possibly you could come out ahead of the tradit...

If you look at Tom Ligon's comments on the PXL-1 in this thread you can see that they worked with a closed box machine that had some success. I can't remember where, but I'm fairly certain it was suggested that a negative charged element be placed in the cusps to repell electrons and prevent cusp lo...

Let's see if I got this right: instead of just having straight-up repellers, you'd add another grid or something between them and the core to produce a field to repell the ions. So the potential would be more positive at this screen/grid, and it would turn the ions back, while the electrons would pa...

So does anyone know whether the current experiment being conducted is using a cap bank for HV power supply, or do they have steady-state source? IIRC, the HV supply was the limiting factor; if it weren't, what kind of limit would be placed by the temperature of the copper wires in the magrid?

Hmm. (Why is there not a 'beard-stroke' emoticon? I really need that!)

That new method sounds good. I bet it's harder to implement though; probably more coding. I wonder how much we can find out ~ it just by mining the internet?

MSimon wrote:[Seconds of operation is probably a minimum requirement - minutes better.

What makes you say that? The data table in the LANL page linked above showed tests only 5ms long. Sure, they were using a small device, but the scaling shouldn't require minutes!

hmm, so the reason why you can't just plug the cusps with some kind of negative charged object/grid/space-charge is that it will draw out positive ions: the electron confinement must be entirely magnetic, and not electrostatic. Also, in this document, page 18, Bussard mentions that 12.57 MW of injec...

Hmm, so it's kinda like a cross between the Focus Fusion plasma toroids and sonofusion on steroids. That's very interesting.

I think the X-Prize for suborbital tourism should demonstrate that these sort of things don't necessarily get what they want accomplished. They seem to just bend the trajectories of existing organizations working on a problem, not creating much new. The other issue is, look at SS1. That ship can't b...

HEy, just wanted to throw this out there: I'm applying for a summer internship program at ORNL for undergrads. I'm hoping I get into their plasma/fusion research (which is kinda skimpy, but at least it's there). (They let me request a second choice, so I put PPPL down for that; if I thought I had a ...

BTW there is no need to magnetically shield the grid if the charge is negative. The negative charge will keep electrons away Actually, I think they are trying to use a magnetic field to confine electrons to produce an even higher negative potential inside the grid, not to shield the grid. But as yo...