Talk-Polywell.org

There is a picture up at

http://www.emc2fusion.org/

EMC2 Fusion showing the WB-7 Test Reactor vessel. All polished stainless steel with a nice logo.

H/T Tom Ligon

Hey Hey!

Thanks. The darn thing is practically real to me now. I have butterflies me tummy.
Hey, it sort of looks like an autoclave.

Hawt.

Fusion Porn

Is this still being funded by ONR, or has some other group within the Navy taken it over?

It is being funded by the Navy, but I'm pretty sure ORN is not the group within the Navy supporting it. One day maybe I can tell the whole story. There are hints of in in another thread, where somebody dug up a rant I was goaded into on Fusor.net regarding the "Todd Rider Mess".

viewtopic.php?t=382

DARPA did fund quite a bit of the earlier work.

DARPA did fund quite a bit of the earlier work.

That's interesting, I had never heard that before. Do you know what years?

Ah, here wo go http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:F6 ... cd=4&gl=us

Looks like 1989-1992 was DARPA.

I guess I had read this before, and forgot.

I see you found it. I was going to direct you to the collection of papers archived on askmar.com. Someone here found a cache of them that had all sorts of juicy tidbits, including the bremsstrahlung-beating scheme, and they were DARPA-funded, from around 1991.

I just thought it was funny that if this pans out, maybe the Internet will be only the second most important thing to come out of DARPA's 1980s research.

What's the bremmstrahlung beating scheme? Is it that the electrons reexchange energy with the ions at the edge cooling them? Is it using monoenergetic ion distributions to take advantage of the 140keV Boron peak?

jmc,

Here's Bussard's 1991 paper on brem.

http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA257895

The short version is that brem is only a problem with p-B11, and involves high-energy electrons interacting with the B11.

To beat it primarily involves two tricks. The first is to run hydrogen-rich, so there is not as much B11 present.

The second trick is to control the "virtual anode height". If the machine were run with few or no ions, the electrons would mutually repel in the center, and would have their minimum kinetic energy there. Low electron kinetic energy beats the brem problem. But the ions also concentrate there, creating a virtual anode that the electrons like. If allowed to get too high, the virtual anode allows the electrons in at high kinetic energy, so the idea is to control the ion population to a modest level.

There's also a concern for electron energy scattering (essentially electron thermalization), for which there is supposedly an annealing mechanism comparable to the one for the electrons. That could have some bearing on brem, but is also important for all fuels.

Techincal paper cited in above link



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