TallDave wrote:Oddly, he says the electron losses in IEC are prohibitive.
And the ion upscattering losses are "prohibitive".
Even without annealing ion upscattering losses can be reduced to about the fifth power of the ration of the ion energy to well depth, in his critique, if you try increasing the well depth you'll find ions losses rapidly become tolerable, in addition ion particle losses are not ion energy losses, they only lose the energy equivalent of the surplus energy they are given above the well.
Also in his critique he pessimistically and falsely assumes that electron which escape out of the cusp lose their full well energy without recirculation. Though his assumption of the total cusp loss area was optimistic, (i.e, no line cusps, high field near point cusps, etc. )
Its a sure thing he would have known about the polwell, admittedly not all the juicy details we know now, but its as if the presentation is showing every possible method of fusion besides polywell.
Sure, I was thinking of the 1e5 electron transit results from WB-6 specifically.
Why not? If he thinks he's right, at least he shows his work in detail.
Oh, I agree. No reason not to. I just found it amusing that that happened to be the one place where he cited himself.
And the ion upscattering losses are "prohibitive".
It is also shown that realistic parabolic-like wells result in better energy gains than square wells, particularly at large well depths (>100 kV). Operating regimes with fusion power to ion input power ratios (Q-value) >100 have been identified.
He either didn't know or doesn't agree, presumably. Nebel, though, considers this the definitive analysis of the ion diffusion question.