Page 2 of 4

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Mon May 07, 2018 5:16 pm
by tannerhorne
-

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Mon May 07, 2018 6:29 pm
by ladajo
Unfortunately I can't go more detail about the potential well.
Ok, why?

Can't you at least talk about the approach you intend? I think you can do that at least, without the specifics you seem to be implying you are protecting? Or have I read you wrong?

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Mon May 07, 2018 9:21 pm
by paperburn1
Tom Ligon wrote: If liquid helium is too hard to manage in an industrial environment, what does that say about tokomak designs based on such magnets?
Tokomak need large amount of He2. The ITER has a cooling plant designed to condense 12000 liters per hour back into wet He2 per hour.
so just as a loose boot strap the USA has about one billion cubic meters of helium or about 700 million liters of the cool stuff to play with in science.
As a number 12000 liters (picked out of my backside) lets say that is the number of liters required for each power plant. That would be enough juice for 57000 power plants with no losses. Currently their are about 65000 power plants in the world.
As leaky as this stuff is I would find it hard to accept that in a typical power plant environment there would not be any losses. We can not even make a tight system for Freon or ammonia that would last for years without jacking the cost though the roof. This leads me to think liquid nitrogen will be the go to coolant if at all possible.

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Wed May 09, 2018 11:54 pm
by tannerhorne
-

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Thu May 10, 2018 11:36 am
by ladajo
Thanks. How well have you studied the most current public releases from EMC2?

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Thu May 10, 2018 1:21 pm
by tannerhorne
Yes, thanks, I certainly have! Not only that, I have been in contact with almost every group and specialist in the world that could bring useful knowledge to the project.

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Thu May 10, 2018 4:34 pm
by ladajo
And you are still thinking to bias the grids?

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Fri May 11, 2018 2:30 am
by paperburn1
There are still a lot of schools of thought that believe grid biasing is the only path to net plus operation.... I think park may be on to something .

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Fri May 11, 2018 9:03 pm
by tannerhorne
-

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Mon May 14, 2018 7:33 am
by crowberry
What kind of instrumentation do you have on your current device? What value of beta have you measured on your current device?

What instrumentation are you planning to have on your next device?

Have you published anything on your current device? Do you plan to publish results achieved with the next device?

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Thu May 17, 2018 2:37 am
by tannerhorne
Nothing published. All I can say is I'd love to publish within the year, but you know everything takes ~3.141592653589793 times (JPL says that is generally enough precision) as long as you want it to. :)

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2018 6:10 pm
by tannerhorne
New 2nd gen chamber back from paint! Now the real works starts.
newchamber.jpg
newchamber.jpg (54.6 KiB) Viewed 20224 times

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2018 2:15 am
by happyjack27
* the earlier picture shows the plasma I glow mode. I assume that's just so we can see it, and that vacuum pressure is actually much higher.
* I'm seeing largely a layered 2D configuration. So it makes me wonder:
** what is the theory of confinement? Expected confinement time?
** what kind of data are you hoping to collect? I guess this harks back to someone earlier question about diagnostica and ports and measurenents.

Of course I don't mean to pry and just say it's classified or whatever...i'm just a random person being curious and nosy.

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2018 3:07 pm
by tannerhorne
Happyjack,

Thanks for your questions and good observation. I will answer what I can. In order to visualize the plasma and field the pressure must be fairly high, not necessarily an operating condition. Generally, in any of these type of containment systems, Polywell, or even LM, there has to be a minimum amount of plasma to generate increased beta conditions. That being said, the higher the pressure the more interaction you have with cold gas increasing ion-ion thermalization. This is probably the most significant loss mechanism. We will attempt to mitigate this as much as possible.


What do you mean by 2D configuration? The video and pictures you see are of the spindle or biconic cusp configuration. This is a good test bed for the technology and "simple" to construct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biconic_cusp It is representative enough of many designs and a great place to start. I think that every plasma researcher should have a superconducting biconic cusp device at their disposal and would be happy to produce a commercial system if there was a market.


Tanner

Re: 1st Superconducting High-beta Device

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2018 3:44 pm
by Tom Ligon
As I recall Dr. Park's talks a few years ago, the beta = 1 condition with 5T superconducting magnets suggested a plasma pressure of some stupendous number like 120 atmospheres! High-performance steam boiler stuff!

Dr. Bussard was always concerned with fast ion, slow neutral interactions, which produce a slow ion and a fast neutral. The neutral cannot be trapped and is lost.