What claims are you referring to? This is the last I heard of:CaptainBeowulf wrote:So does anyone have any additional insight on Tri-Alpha's latest claims?
http://www.greentechmedia.com/green-lig ... next-year/
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/06/tri-al ... atent.html
It will be interesting to see what they actually build. They are getting into that range of time where they believed they would have something useful.
This was interesting too:
That's sort of the opposite philosophy to PW, in which electrons are more easily confined. I don't know what their field curvature looks like, though, so I don't know how applicable that "anomalous transport" is to Polywell. I've always been very fuzzy on the whole "field reversed" concept, esp the timeframes involved in reversal. Also, are they thinking their ion distribution will be something like monoenergetic? I wonder how much neutronicity from side reactions they're expecting and how that compares with Rick's estimate for a PW version he gave here a while back.Magnetic confinement is ineffective for electrons because they have a small gyroradius--due to their small mass--and are therefore sensitive to short-wavelength fluctuations that cause anomalous transport. Therefore, the electrons areeffectively confined in a deep potential well by an electrostatic field, which tends to prevent the anomalous transport of energy by electrons. The electrons that escape confinement must travel from the high density region near the null surface to the surface of the plasma. In so doing, most of their energy is spent in ascending the energy well. When electrons reach the plasma surface and leave with fusion product ions, they have little energy left to transport. The strong electrostatic field also tends to make all the ion drift orbits rotate in the diamagnetic direction, so that they are contained. The electrostatic field further provides a cooling mechanism for electrons, which reduces their radiation losses.