I've been getting some questions as to what I'm trying to do and how I'm approaching it, and putting the answers in, say, a youtube comment section or some social media is becoming tiring, so I though to just put the generic answer here and link back to it in future. I'm not complaining about questions,
more the opposite - but coming up with a descriptive answer over and over is just silly when I could put it here.
The very basis of "why" is that I believe we did have this anomalous output on a few occaisions, which is an "existance proof", and therefore it's possible that they exist - so the real problem is "OK, then how does that work?" and of course "How can I do that better, and on demand?". Yes, we've replicated the anomalous output or something really close on a few occasions, always a little different to the extent we were able to measure anything before the gear we use to measure things in the normal case is crashed or ruined by "too much success". And in fact, there seems to be good reason to believe that other reports of super high output that were difficult to replicate might also be true. But it's a case of...Farnsworth was busy inventing things like TV and didn't have the data aq we have, for just one example, and the "no one expects the Spanish Inquisition" effect for another. It's real hard to design and test data aq gear for conditions you can mainly only speculate about, and rarely have in order to test your stuff. At least on our resources. Now that I kind of have a feel, yeah, the next setup will be better. Better enough is an open question, and must be for now.
the important point here is that knowing there's a prize at the end of the rainbow makes it a lot easier to keep chasing it than otherwise. A historic example might be the speed with which the Soviets manage to dupe the atomic bomb (and all the pieces leading up to it!) - far faster than our "experts" thought possible, and yes, even in the presence of some espionage. Knowing the game is worth the candle is a powerful motivator.
What I know is that some various impedances - parasitic or intentional tuned circuits, in the power, which cause kick back and ringdown (which isn't an ideal damped sine decay as the load isn't a resistor or even close) are always present when the good stuff happens. And it happens in a range of those parasitics. One case was even pretty close to what an experienced RF engineer would guesstimate was present in for example, Farnsworth's setup. He didn't have good data aq, and mine fried....but OK, now that a little is known about what's being looked for, and under what conditions, the next and subsequent times are going to be better. The fact that this happens in a range of condtions is completely consonant with some existing math.
I am assuming, because anything else would be somewhere between insane and stupid, that all this is following the standard model, or close enough. Any deviation in that large enough to cause or allow what I saw would have been noticed repeatedly in the early part of the previous century. There is only one reasonable model I can come up with that fits, though that might be a limitation of my own brain. Any other input that works with all the observations is welcome (See, Feynman test).
I've likened the issues to solving the 3 body gravitational problem feedforward, but it's by far worse than that in actuality. And I will acknowledge it's not the best analogy (if there is a best one) since the 3 body problem
has been solved for a couple special cases. Our case is a bit different and more difficult. Given a few types of bodies, with varying values of G (and both polarities!) interacting, with the need to also account for what might be called collisions (or at least scattering, not always elastic), recombination, charge exchange between ions and neutrals and probably a few I haven't typed yet -
Tell me the initial conditions and applied fields vs time in what shape apparatus will cause all the relevant particles to come together at some focus pretty much all at once, and after a pass which scatters a lot of them, without losing much energy, repeat that cycle until fusion (the ultimate inelastic scattering) happens to enough of them that we have gain.Makes the 3 body problem look pretty trivial - all that requires is telling me the future state of a system with all the initial conditions known.
If that were easy, than instead of putting in the setup for say, carbon arranged like so - and finding out the properties of say, a diamond, we could simply ask the standard model to tell us how to make something clear that was very hard...but nope, this is a generally unsolved problem (and there's a one to many to one mapping there on top).
Here we have very roughly (using for example 3 for pi and 22 liters/mole) 3 x 10
18 particles at our nominal 2 10-
2 millibar.
We have (at least) electrons with their e/m ratio, D+ ions, D
2, D
2+, and assorted other junk. Given the numbers we get, it could even be the rare D- ions doing all the fusion by being accelerated in to the tank walls and hitting adsorbed neutral molecules!
As luck would have it, we do have some math for a very special case - the case where there are so few ions they don't "see" each other very much (at least don't deflect each other on centimeter scales enough to hit the tank walls often - we need of course far closer proximity). In that special case, only e/m, some sizes and shapes, "low enough" pressure matter much to the field required for both containment and driven motion withing that containment. This math is that for the basic mass spectrometer- the Mathieu math. We know that if you build an apparatus with such and such a shape (many work, and the classic hyperbolic or quadrupole shapes are more ideal, but not required for basic function) you can trap ions, and whether you like it much or not, it's going to be somewhat e/m selective. Further, some setups have what is called in the art "aperture" or the ability to capture and normalize the motions of things not in perfect sync at the start.
Here's a search term for google:
Mathieu equation quadrupole which will get you going. I'm using a very nice tome that BillF bought us, "Quadrupole Mass Spectrometry and its Applications", edited by Peter H. Dawson, ISBN 1-56396-455-4.
Highly recommended to help understand the most basic issues.However, most all work on things like this has been directed to the best sensitivity, and resolution. While related, our problem lives at another end of some scales. We don't need sensitivity to only a few particles - we want the opposite - density as high as we can have it without losing control due to random scattering. We don't want resolution and don't need it much either - we just want to work with D+, and the rest can go into the vacuum pump for all we care. For our purposes, the "simple" engineering required to reprocess the fuel and recycle it is not worth worrying about until the rest works.
The basic math for ideal conditions has various overlaps where things can works - for a mass spectrometer, that operating point is usually chosen just off the edge of stability. No one cares of a particle is lost after 6 cycles of orbit if it's going into a detector in 5, for example. And you get better resolution doing that. But that's not what we want - but luckily (but only for the ideal case), the math does show that we can operate smack dab in the middle of stability too. It's just that for the mass spec app, no one does it.
Now, the conditions described by that simple(!) math aren't the ones we want here. We want
lots of particles. Not only will they affect one another's trajectories via the Coloumb forces, they'll often scatter off one another, or even background neutrals, as the density get higher near some periodic focus. The periodic is assumed as there's no currently feasible way to fire a bunch of ions at another bunch with enough sniper like accuracy to get reasonable amounts of them to fuse in one pass. Another condition we want is to recover the energy of the ones that didn't fuse for another go around. Further along those lines, in case of scattering knocking things off course (or out of a phase diagram) - we'd like to recapture them for the next roundy-round.
The driven recirculation is possible and has been done plenty of times for the few-particle case. The recovery of scattered particles has been kind of done for the "some more" particles case.
So that's more engineering than science, so far.
It's evident at least to me, that the basic math needs more terms, but the shapes and values of them is not so obvious, at least if we don't want to just throw up our hands and say this isn't possible. Because, hey, I know it
is - that existence-proof thing. Even if the terms are basically describing stochastic phenomena, quantifying them is helpful.
Even for uncharged molecules, the best math has a discontinuity between what's called ballistic flow and molecular flow. Vacuum system design doesn't care much, and simply draws a line on the plot between where one stops working and the other (hydrodynamic) starts, and calls it good enough. But it's not good enough for this. And we have a far more complex setup with charges and those forces, and at times, we hope, insanely higher density - getting nuclei to come close enough together and linger long enough, often enough for a significant fraction of them to tunnel into fusion via the strong force which we otherwise have no control over - we're just banging the rocks together...(HHGTTG).
So this is why I'm building an apparatus that can work "at all" from fairly hard vacuum on up. The plan is to start where the existing math works, and perhaps adjust the geometry of our trap/lensing system a bit based on what we see there. But then - and only then - we'll be equipped to start pushing into the density or base pressure levels we know we're going to need to make this work with a non-infinite effective compression ratio (I'm using that term loosely here, as in our world, motions are hopefully more coherent than a thermalized system - and nope, the temperature of a bullet had little effect on that target. In our case, cool is better most likely.).
The hope is that once we see what minor perturbations to the math look like, we can guess and verify some of that extra stuff we know is needed. We kind of need the equivalent of things like Reynolds number and much beyond. Knowing there's turbulence is a long way from knowing about a wingtip vortex or predicting a contrail (not the best analogy but..).
To add...
A reason I think I'm beginning to understand (uh oh, dangerous words) is that what math we do have - which almost kind of works at this pressure - says that the overlap region can be large for a limited amount of trapping and recirculating. There is the complicated addition of scattering, and the issue that during a kickback and ringdown, the impedance of the fusor isn't a resistance. In fact, one big feature is that the instant the grid tries to go positive in ringing, the tank acts like a diode, clipping most of that off the waveform - it seems all the free electrons want to go to the grid. This more or less instantly changes the composition of what is present - at least for a little while. You can't have huge charge separation in this setup, because at some point the resulting particle-charged-induced field becomes strong enough to simply yank electrons off the tank walls - this is a problem they have at CERN at similar beam currents.
Looking at the math, getting close enough for things to work as we wish "a little" is a lot easier than getting "a lot" - and that's what we're going for. It works out that the higher the amplitude of the RF on the grid, the higher the voltage can be and not lose particles to the tank walls, and conversely. But at too-low voltages, they aren't going very fast when passing one another, and we hope, colliding. Further, the higher the charge density at any one point in space and time, the less effective our applied field is - it may be swamped by the particles themselves.
Since making kilovolt RF+DC fields, which vary appropriately by guess and hitting the magic numbers is super unlikely (wasted a year and a tear)...the slower but surer way now seems best.
And due to the non linear response of the tank itself...a sine wave might not be the thing we want...and on and on for quite a lot of possibilities. So I want to creep up on it.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
