Talk-Polywell.org

Ask away! Sometimes "experts" make assumptions that are wrong, and simple questions expose it!

OK! I put the code up in the same directory: http://www.eskimo.com/~eresrch/Fusion/ There is no index.html, so it just shows up as a directory listing. The *.c files are the code I used to create the pictures in the "Virtual Polywell" pdf. I use GSLmath and pnglib, so feel free to substitute if you ...

For this kind of stuff I use C. It's been a long long time since I used FORTRAN! I've got a model of the B and E fields done, and I can post that code if you like. The formulas are in the "virtual polywell" write up I'm working on: http://www.eskimo.com/~eresrch/Fusion/fusion.pdf I'm trying to get s...

yup! That's why you want IAEA inspections!!

I think the electric field is more important that the magnetic field. In toroids confinement uses the magnetic field parallel to the containment vessle and talking about beta=1 makes sense. For the polywell the magnetic field is mostly radial and perpendicular to the containment vessle. The way I th...

I want to combine a few ideas along the lines of POPS and accelerators.
But I want to see the math first before I open my mouth and prove I'm a fool

Doesn't U-238 have a fairly lousy cross-section with fast neutrons? Here's a plot of the neutron cross section over on fusor.net: http://fusor.net/board/view.php?bn=fusor_neutrons&key=1192914434 Looks like it drops off the face of the earth above 10 MeV, so moderators like water or parafin would wo...

Yes, I mis-read the advertisement Typical, too late at night and too much fun. We'll have to wait a couple of years and then I'll be correct!

It helps because they are trying to form beams of ions. The idea is to create a set of linear accelerators, but keep the whole thing inside a simple spherical tank. If the ions stay in the "beam path", they don't hit the grids and that improves efficiency a lot.

I haven't gotten to POPS yet. One step at a time! But I realized my cost estimate is way off - too late at night and not close enough reading. 30TB is closer to $18k. Still, it's accessable and possible to think about 256TB as a disk farm of servers with distributed world wide computing chomping on ...

Yes, I think you could easily partition the problem for BOINC. Short range interactions can be done on each PC. Each time step consists of two parts, field equations and particle motions. Once you know where all the particles are, you can compute the long range fields, then figure out how all the pa...

Yes, but scanning 256 terrabytes will take a long time even on a distributed system. Better to think a little harder and reduce the size of the problem. Brute force is nice if you can use it, but sometimes a little finesse can go a long way to getting the answer quicker. And sometimes just as accura...

I figured a simple brute force calculation would be the easiest thing to do. So the first thing I did was figure out how much storage space a simple calc would take. For my parameters, it was a mere 256 TERAbytes. Since I've only got a few GB, it ain't gonna happen on my home machine!! So I headed i...

Keegan, If I could confuse Fermi I'd be pretty happy :) I would guess the 4 pipes lead out to those balls which are at the cusps. I would guess they are Langmuir probes for measuring electron and ion densities. MSimon, I think there is a way. If the electron energy is high enough to ionize the H and...

I have a first write up which explains what I've tried to do on modeling the polywell. It can be found here:

http://www.eskimo.com/~eresrch/Fusion/fusion.pdf.

It's obviously pretty crude, but it's a start. Comments on how to improve things are welcome!