Talk-Polywell.org

I'm ever so slowly getting code to run. I now have a plot http://www.eskimo.com/~eresrch/Fusion/mag.png of one coil, close to the axis. Red is x, green is y and blue is the z axis. The magnetic vectors don't have directions. It is possible to add, but I'd rather work on getting the other coils added...

Excellent questions. Let's go find some answers!

A magnetron is an e-gun - it just has chambers on it make the microwaves. If you have a background gas and enough field strength to ionize, then you get electrons from the excitation process. What is the efficiency at the pressure you need to run the device at? I like the idea of a virtual device. T...

I was reading about that in the Planetary Society rag. Seems like a great resource, I'll have to see how much work it really takes to set something up.
But the code has to work correctly first...

That's no kidding! I'm having a blast pulling old books off the shelf and diving into "basic" math and physics. But boy am I rusty. Code up my equations and BLOOWY - division by zero all over the place. I just got some of it fixed, but the graphics for viewing needs more work. Trying to display stuf...

MSimon wrote:For a few mil I can design you a quantum computer that can solve the equations in real time.

Speaking of time that gives you 13 dimensions to deal with.

Yeah, a quantum computer would be nice!

A prime number of dimensions must be a good sign

If the difference is 1e-6, then the electric field will be pretty huge. I suspect that's a good thing, it helps keep the positive ions at high speed so long as you have more electrons in the middle. I don't think the physics is all that obscure or complicated, but I'm trained in the art. The hard pa...

No, I haven't tried those. I've used VisIt from LLNL which works on windows, but I'm running a linux distro. Computing the mag field is pretty simple, just computationally time consuming. Once I've got the data, I want to check that it looks reasonable - visualization is the simplest way to do that....

Yargh... I finally got some code to generate mag field descriptions. But nubmers are no fun to read, so I went looking for some 3D data viewers that might run under my linux box. By mid day, I had gotten a few downloads to fail and then in the process of trying to get one program to compile, "fixed"...

I would think fiberoptic would be great for a radiation environment. Plus it's fast. I don't think the transport protocols matter that much, once you've got a good physical network you can pretty much make it work. Understanding system requirements may suggest multiple transport protocols too - some...

Yeah, the SHARC is pretty cool. I built debuggers for some of the early versions, but have given up on it. The core processor is very nice, but the external access in some of the versions was crippled or difficult. The ADI floating point flagship is now the TigerSHARC, and that's a complex beast. I ...

I guess if the assembler is FORTH, I won't notice I'm programming in FORTH! The sea of processors was started with the TRANSPUTER, which never took off because it was way to far ahead of its time. At this point you can hundreds of processors on a single chip fairly easily and spread out a complicate...

Bussard suggests that the positive MaGrid be the ion source. You'd build your proton/boron gun as part of the field coil and use voltage between the grid and virtual cathode as the projection energy. The advantage of that is being able to control the electrons and inject them as part of the electron...

I'm not sure. I am going to spend some time grinding thru Maxwell's equations to try to find out over the next few days/weeks though! As a rough guess, the cusp regions will have concentrating fields, so the electrons should mirror there. Basicly, the number of "flux lines" trapped in an electrons o...

Control implies diagnostic information. What kinds of sensors do you envision as part of the control loop? I would hope the system is large enough that time scales will be long and control will be easy. Just because we can control things in the gigahertz doesn't mean we should design a power system ...