Talk-Polywell.org

One aspect of P-W operation I dont see clearly is what happens if we increase B field strengh and internal density, but dont modify electron injectors potential nor net charge.

My intuition says that it would not work, but I can't justify it so I'm most probably wrong.

Anyone?

Bussard basically moved from the idea of extraordinary confinement with some recirculation to very good confinement with exceptional recirculation when he went to the WB6. He accepted that line cusps will exist and focused on getting better recirculation. He is accepting cusps in any form in these ...

I think that having Carlson here would be great.

Nothing better to improve (or disprove) a discourse that a little opposition/competition to substantiate its points.

Remember that recirculation is never 100% perfect, some of the electrons that get out dont come back, so there is still the neccesity of making cusps losses as little as possible. With only two opposed coils you'd have mirror confinement but from that field geometry no wiffle ball could be formed, a...

I wonder if anyone has ever tried to run a tokamak with a non neutral plasma. Keep interior walls at ground potential and compensate electron losses by injection from the exterior. A lot like a polywell.

At first sight looks like that could improve pure magnetic confinement.

The P-W generator Positive Terminal is the collector grid/s for the alphas. As more and more alphas get out from the device center plasma, its net charge grows increasingly negative. That makes those electrons remaining inside try to escape harder and harder, so more and more of them will flee from ...

When enough electrons and ions are spinning around the external B field lines you get a reduction in the total field. That causes the gyroradius to grow, which allows the external field to take over again. So there is a constant balance. The higher the pressure, the more ions and electrons there ar...

Charlie, The real world consideration is 1 MW/sq m and about 100 deg K delta T. Inlet of the cooling loop to outlet. For LN2 cooled Cu magnets I think I allowed 10K delta T. Maybe 20K. LN2 can't be liquid at any temp above 120K. It boils at 77K. You can get some help by boiling at a lower pressure....

Some tries to write programs of this sort in the past have been limited by the lack of sufficient memory or processor speed. It could be worth studying (now that it is in its beginning stages) if it could be design to run in a loosely-coupled multiprocessor grid instead of just one cpu. I have acces...

20% of a 100MW fusion reaction is a LOT of power barraging the MaGrid. We have a solution: a LOT of heat transfer. About 100 to 400 gpm of cooling water per grid. Not too bad. (multiply by 4X to get l/min - close enough for now). Simon, I think you have some BOE figures about the dimensions of the ...

Interesting. Carlson seems to be softening up a bit.

Maybe Dr Nebel is giving him some new data he didn't new of before.

Anyway looks like Carlson is giving more time to writing his critics than he is to gathering information about what he criticizes.

Funny, I was just thinking about this yesterday. It seems to me that the best shape would be one that is conformal to the shape of the field itself at any given point around the coil. I'm assuming that since round was much better than square and round is much closer to the shape of the fields, that...

Final thought: the fact that the alpha population isn't energetically homogeneous is a huge pain in the ass. We pretty much have to eat that extra 1 MeV from the 3.5 MeV alphas as heat (requiring lots of cooling) There's going to be lots of cooling regardless. In fact, most likely there will be so ...

Tombo, sorry but I dont understand what you mean. Simon, I can have made some error integrating the B-field of course, but if I have not the field is very approximately conformal to the coils surface. You could look them just like high radius/length cilindrical coils, a bit deformated. And the small...

So here's my problem: We've got a big anode charged up to some high positive voltage. We're firing 8.6 MeV alpha particles at that anode. Now, we know that there are now Coulomb forces between the alpha and the metallic atoms in the anode. However, unlike electrons, you can't make the metal atoms g...