Science/Engineering/Technical forums

I apologize for this late posting, but yes, we are all graduating. Luckily I know someone on the team for the August 2011-May 2012 team, so I will make sure (hopefully) he gets on here and posts some milestones. Also, the other team leader from my year is now a grad student and he has told me he has ...

Alright, we've been EXTREMELY busy since my last post, so this is going to be a long one. Our radiation shielding team decided to orient he reactor vertically now versus the previous horizontal arrangement. So we had to re-run all of our fill and vacuum lines after we had them fixed. Its their part ...

Thanks for all of the support! Right now, we're tackling the gas system to try and have better control. We think that this is why we couldn't repeat the 12,304 neutron count run, but it definitely could also be due to the fact that the temperature 1/4" from the outside of the sphere was REALLY hot ...

We had another test today. First off, I'll come back with more numbers later once we wade through all of the data collected, but I have some of the major results. We have most definitely achieved fusion here at Virginia Tech. Our highest neutron count over a three minute period today was 12,308. We ...

LOL. I got a huge laugh out of that post Doug. I even had to use two hands there to try and barely turn the valve (I even made a bigger dial so I would turn the actual dial from the needle valve less). But I've been working on being able to coordinate turning the fill needle valve, vacuum needle ...

Just wanted to post a picture from our fusion test on April 2, 2011. I'm the person on the right messing with the D2 needle valve and the power supply below the table top. I'm wearing a personal TLD and the person to the left of me is operating the data acquisition program and running some neutron ...

I'm hoping it was our vacuum pump vibrating the cart our fusor is on. We have put a whisk design in there for the next test (it's made out of tungsten) and it's hardly moving if at all. I've been looking more at the counts we were getting per 3 minutes during our test. Our highest was 1184 and the ...

Alright so we finally have some results. We ran deuterium through the reactor for about 2 hours on Saturday, April 2nd. I was told to deviate from our original test plan, so we had a couple of overcurrent trips as we tried to start a plasma at -19 kV. Finally we were able to go with our original ...

We've got the vacuum and fill system 'fixed.' Once we have gotten a date that works for our adviser and the university's radiation safety officer, we'll run some deuterium through the system.

We finally got the parts to finish assembling our fill side today. We have one charging reservoir for D2 only and one for any other gas we want to put in there (Argon at the moment). I installed everything today and let the pump pull it all down to a vacuum (I hope). As i left, the pump looked like ...