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Here people including you believe that more powerful electron gun will produce well the depth of which will be proportional to electron current. But namely that is a big mistake.
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I won't argue about you other points, except to say that potential well formation has a lot of literature. Proceed through the Japan - US IEC conferences/ presentations as a starting source.
Your point about more powerful E- guns being the key being a fallacy may be pertinent, tough I doubt in the manner you perceive.
EMC2 tried increasing the power of the E guns with only a modest improvement in their potential well in WB5. The improvement was dissapointing because confinement issues were more important as they realized and which they applied to WB6.
Certainly increasing the E- guns raw power will increase the well depth, but it is a non linear process. Increasing the electron current is the key. The current is the input divided by the output. With no electron containment the current is 1 if 1 Coulomb is injected and 1 Coulomb exits per unit of time. This is where recirculation, confinement, superconductivity, etc. terms become applicable. They all increase the current in the system with out necessarily increasing the input current. If confinemnt causes the electrons to flow from point a to point b and back in the system this circular current is as effective as single pass currents with correspondingly greater input.
WB4 had confinement allowing for ~ 10,000 passes. This means the internal current was multiplied 10,000 fold relative to the input current. WB6 reportedly improved on this ~ 10 fold, partially through improved recirculation. Now the internal circular current was multiplied ~ 100,000 times relative to the input current.
WB6 had ~ 45 amps of input electron current, so the internal current was actually ~ 4.5 million amps. This 100,000 amplification in the system current is considerable. It would be challenging to increase the input current to anything approaching this even if you ignored the Q. Using Watts, the input current of 45 amps accelerated through 12,000 volts resulted in input power of ~ 500,000 Watts. Without any confinement / recirculation the necessary input power would have been ~ 50 billion Watts. So, it is safe to say that a lot of power was required to establish and maintain the potential well. Another way to say it is that only 500,000 Watts was required to establish the well, but only for a few microseconds at most. The confinement allows for this input to maintain the well for many milliseconds. This is equivalent to a superconductor as someone recently pointed out in another thread. A current flow is set up with power input, but thereafter it is maintained by the circular current without losses, and therefor no additional input requirements. The Polywell is not perfect like a superconductor so some input requirements are needed but they are (hopefully) modest and tolerable. Also, as there is some less efficiency as the Wiffleball is forming you need some minimal power level to ramp things up. You cannot trickle in power to establish the conditions. That is why EMC2 used high voltage capacitors to generate the 500,000 Watts of input power. They could produce plenty of electrons from batteries, but the accelerating voltage maintenance necessary could not be matched by their modest power supplies.
Polywell power input is supposed to scale B^0.25 * radius ^2. Multiply that by any increased voltage (like 120KV instead of 12 KV) and the need for robust power supplies/ E-guns becomes apparent.
A 3 meter and 10 Tesla machine might require 500KW * 4*100* 10 = ~ 2 billion watts of input power. This assumes confinement cannot be improved. Any small improvement in electron containment has a large impact. Note that with the scaling the fusion output in this machine would be ~ 0.001 W *100,000,000 *1000 * 100= 10 billion Watts. Profitable fusion is possible if the numbers are accepted. This also illustrates that anything that can improve on the input side (confinement efficiency and / or injection efficiency) leads to large benefits where size, cost, etc. issues are considered.
I don't know what the efficiency of the electrons emitted from the car headlight filaments getting into WB6 was. I don' know how much improvement could be made, but this is another area where any improvement could also be tremendously important to the final power requirements. I can see where it would be of prime concern to researchers who are modeling the system.
Dan Tibbets
To error is human... and I'm very human.