Talk-Polywell.org

I've learned a lot about spherical trigonometry attempting to find some simple rules for placing circular coils around a sphere in a uniform way. Every attempt gives some result, but nothing is ever "uniform". For N = 4, 6 or 12 you can get full coverage of a sphere with equadistant centers of circu...

Thanks everybody. I think I'll start writing up my stuff to make it easier to beat me over the head with it. After thrashing around with high level complicated stuff I finally realized how simple the actual problem of setting up coils really is. The process of attempting to describe the theory may w...

Howdy Tom, Thanks for that NOAA link, I love the "total electron content" map. My kids will like the solar image - they mapped the sun during a summer camp - no sun spots at all during the two weeks they looked! Speaking of field maps, I'm working on some algorithms to map an arbitrary number of coi...

You all must be brothers, you sound just like my kids. But let's take one thing at a time and just stick to facts. As engineers we build stuff that works, and it works well for a long time. And we're all proud of it and we all have big egos. You can't accomplish anything without a big ego. But name ...

That's what makes it fun! There's a physicist here in Madison who puts on a show for kids every year. It's called the "wonders of physics" http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/demobook/intro.htm . They use a 1 million volt Tesla coil and it is always spectacular. Under controlled conditions I would think ...

Mag fields fall off as 1/r^3. I can't see how the sun's magnetic field could create the earth's field. The sun is only 10^6 times larger than earth, so it's field would be at best 10^6 times larger. But the distance is 10^11 meters, so 10^6/10^33 is really really tiny. I might have blown a few decim...

That kind of MaGrid plus a Tesla coil could make for some nice demonstrations of what the field and currents look like. It could get the idea across without having a vacuum chamber, and high school kids can build stuff that sparks, but isn't all that dangerous. I'll have to see what I can do with th...

Mike I haven't been an RO since my Navy days - '66. I do have a reactor design book from '53 that I go to bed with every night. It covers the basics pretty well. I wasn't born until '54 :) I met a lot of Navy guys, and one roommate went into geology so he could stay on dry land for the rest of his ...

MSimon wrote: Because I'm a nuclear engineer. How about you?

Raises hand - ME TOO!!

"50 thou a year will buy a lot of beer..."

If you can avoid D-T I think that's a good thing. Chemistry for processing fuel or walls is pretty similar, so I think in terms of public relations it's still a problem. I agree with you the magnitude of the problem is far less, but for now public perception of radioactive materials is a far larger ...

I guess the best thing to do is build it and see!

If you have to play with neutrons, fission has the advantage of being surrounded with water. Fusion needs a vacuum so it's hard to stop the neutrons and absorb their energy. In tokamaks it's called the "first wall" problem, and if you are going to use DD or DT in an IEC device you have the same prob...

As an experimentalist I have to agree, but it is still nice to see if you can predict the outcome to some extent. It makes it easier to design similar devices for different applications that way. Langmuir worked out space charge 100 years ago and Bohm extended it to magnetic fields 60 years ago. The...

In the 2006-9_IAC_Paper.pdf Bussard says: On electron trapping: since the ion density is nearly equal to (and thus set by) the trapped electron density, it is desired to have the highest possible electron density for the least possible drive current. This requires that the transport loss _across_ tr...

That's why I'm asking about him. Dr.Krall can help us clear up and reveal technical details, and I recall that he isn't struggling with health issues. I did a web search and found his last address. His last published paper I can find is from 1997 and the company he started: Krall Associates, 1070 A...