Ivy Matt wrote:Not to alarm anyone or start any conspiracy theories, but does anyone have an idea why NASA's NIAC site seems to have disappeared from the Web? All applicable links now seem to redirect to the Office of the Chief Technologist's page.
Rumor 1 Homeland security wanted the name
National Infrastructure Advisory Council
Managed to watch the live stream. Unfortunately Slough did not do the presentation himself.
Not that much new information compared to previous presentations.
There is a new graphic showing the design of the future engine, which is pretty cool.
They provided a timeline for future experiments. Currently building the experimental setup. IIRC, verification runs within 12 months, FRCs within 18.
They want to have everything finished within 2 years from now.
Managed to get a question about supplying the plasma liners answered through the feed. They plan to operate at one pulse every 10 seconds. Making and feeding in the plasma liners has been considered with various approaches and will require quite a large part of the propulsion system mass.
So cool stuff over all, but no ground breaking news from them.
Still was cool to hear more from them. Their presenter (forgot his name) was a really good speaker, btw. Wished all the presenters had been that eloquent and to the point.
Thanks for the report. I wasn't expecting a whole lot, but I thought they would have finished building the experiment by now. It's nice that they provided a timeline, though. Fusion is always two or so years away....
Temperature, density, confinement time: pick any two.
a. Demonstrated coherent FRC ejection from 450 to 6,000 s.
b. Measured low ionization energies. Determined from T/P scaling .
c. Demonstrated up to 1.0 mN-s per FRC @ 50 J (1 N @ 50 kW).
d. Preliminary efficiency measurements of 50+%
e. No detectable erosion or thruster damage has occurred.
The low-end Isp of 450 s is SSME-like. But this is pulsed, so SSME-like thrust does not follow.
The ELF is a really cool device. I particularly like that it could work with air. The thrust ist still rather low, but is AFAIK higher than any other electric thruster in its weight class. The other great thing is that it can scale very well with input power.
The team had a sample of the collapsed, fist-sized aluminum ring resulting from one of those tests on hand for people to see and touch at the recent NASA symposium.
I've fallen and I can't get up trying to figure out how they're crushing the rings around the FRC plasmoid. In a Z-Pinch, you'd do this by running current axially through the cylinder, but the rings can't conduct current axially, since they're floating in a vacuum. Can somebody help me out here?