Reading up on Farnsworth

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Reading up on Farnsworth

Postby ScottMc » Thu Oct 30, 2014 10:47 pm

Wasn't sure where to put this thread but since it covers physics, I figured this is probably the best place. I've had a some free time to spend on reading up on Farnsworths patents and doing some cross checking against what I know in quantum physics (which is not much really, still studying away there for the last decade). OK show of hands, who has actually sat down and read his patents? made notes and checked the references? it's fair amount of work. If anyone is interested the book Intro to quantum mechanics by Dicke-Wittke is a great reference for the time period and what was going on in quantum physics. After reading thru and then stumbling onto this site http://poissor.com/ a couple things 'clicked' So I went back and looked a bit deeper into Patent # 3386883. Some things stood out and I wanted to know if any of this has been covered before. I'll separate out the questions to help with clarity.

1. Flipped the Anode Cathode and claims self-generated E-fields for containment. from a purely theoretical standpoint it should work, however I wonder if due to a lack of high enough voltages this has not been seen. thoughts from those who've attempted this?

2. Shell design is very critical to operation as the chamber is a spherical wave guide. anyone else attempt the calcs to model this or duplicate his layout as written?

3. Cathode material, photoelectric emissivity in UV spectrum to supply secondary electrons. Tungsten screen and 304SS, Tungsten emits low levels of UV however 304SS is higher producer of them, though tungsten will proved quite the target for generating x-rays. anyone else utilize a combination material?

4. Anode at ground potential, this is a preferred method so as to draw electric charge directly from the anode. no thermal secondary heating process to generate electricity.

So all in all different from what I've seen being done by others. The big standout is the treatment of the fields not as particles but energy levels as it should be, electrostatic optics and wave guides are employed in this design. The hat trick though is a spherical wave guide. Now it's getting into juggle with the many body problem or sum over histories. I'm probably going to step off the reservation a bit here, http://shpenkov.janmax.com/index.asp is worth a read.

There's more but I've run out of time for the moment.
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Re: Reading up on Farnsworth

Postby ScottMc » Sat Nov 01, 2014 6:22 pm

And now more...

Virtual Cathodes and Anodes, the Poissor model.
Per the patent paper the operation of the device is designed to create to a shells of virtual potentials. The basic concept is that this relies on gas density and ion energy, the interactions of scattering, neutralization and charge exchange all while controlling the radius of these events so as to maintain only two virtual shells. Now I see what is being described and attempted here, however starting on Column 12 of Page 6 under the heading "maintaining radial thinness of virtual cathode by controlling electron scattering" it delves into a more SM of physics with more focus on 'particle' like structure to scattering events, this to me is not in-line with Farnsworth background of electron optics of charge distribution and energy fields. Now maybe at the time there wasn't another way to effectively describe the novel idea? or it was the work of the PHD brought in by ITT. In any case there has been work done in QM and particle physics that has given us better and more resolution on the electron.
Here's how I see it, the space charge field is a jumbled mess of quantum foam in it's non-charged state. By now using two physical charge conductors, the Anode and Cathode the field can be set into motion. Since electrons are spacial charges in the field there is a certain homogenity to that field, now it's being disrupted and the fields are going to 'move' to there respective lower energy states, however given the density of the area in total that will create area's of distribution where the field charge cannot move further, i.e. now a virtual anode is setup, which in turn will produce a virtual cathode. The two physical anode/cathodes are trying to "smooth" field so that the gradient is linear between them, however the geometry of a spherical space in conjunction with the spherical charge of an electron field it's not possible to do so unless a something thing happens. Like a collapse of the virtual shells due to an increase in density and subsequent neutral charge fields. This increase in density could be viewed more as an unbalance of the fields where the virtual anode breaks down and a 'passing' point is created thus allowing for a linear gradient to build.

This also brings up an interesting point, linear accelerator fusors would be operating where Farnsworth considered his design to be in non-operation. So how does the spherical arrangement work, or why is it preferred? simply because it creates a dense central region where fusion is most likely to happen. I know, we already know this. The beauty is that the applied field sets up a self-maintained field gradient that contains that region, no magnetic fields needed. It gets better though, with the right balance an electron well can be generated so that the fusor is generating electricity without having to utilize thermal transfer.

devils in the details. what needs to be worked out is the infinite number of 'fields' and the density cross sections or "wave interactions" of them, this would more then likely be done as a distributed model of averages. When I say wave interactions I'm referring to a spherical model of the energy probability field. If we assume a distributed avg for the field prior to applied voltage then the time it takes to create virtual cathodes/anodes and how many could be calculated for a given density and applied energy, it may also be able to calculate the probability of a stable state as well within various parameters. Quenching is a bigger problem, too many electrons stripped from the physical conductors will increase the density field and create a breakdown thus loosing the poissor.

more again later...
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Re: Reading up on Farnsworth

Postby Doug Coulter » Sun Nov 02, 2014 12:50 pm

Well, a few of us have indeed read all Farnsworths (and a few others) patents and found them to be both inspiring, and wanting, much like patents of today that people fight over in court. Further, in Farnsworth's case, there was quite a bit of unpublished work that is covered in the Miley book - and some of it made more sense (I have no idea if Miley was selective. but most are).

Re the flipped polarity thing. Carl Willis on fusor.net and others have used that construct with an axial H field for an ion source, and we here thought hard about making an inside-out fusion device, which with the polarity flip, would simply be a glorified beam on target device with the walls serving as a target. Has some interesting advantages there, since it's easier to cool the larger walls vs a small target, which allows them to retain more D as a target, but there's only one of me at present building fusors, and that idea had to take a number, since even in theory - beam on target is more lossy than beam on beam. There has never been a lack of enough high voltage in any serious fusion experiment, it's not the point. If you have to put in say, megavolts, but only get megavolts out - what's the point? No gain.

"Spherical wave guide" is an oxymoron. A wave guide, or for that matter, a piece of coax, is simply a way to move RF from place to place - there are at the least one input and one output. A spherical metal shell IS a resonator for EM fields, but a quick calculation, along with knowing the particle speeds, shows that it's all the very most wrong frequency to do anything much, and that stainless steel has so much skin resistance that even if the plasma was non conductive, there'd be ridiculously low Q. Measuring particle transit times in my fusor has shown they are going a LOT slower, than say, the applied 50kv would indicate, for a variety of reasons that are obvious once you've seen some data on a real machine, or just thought about it enough. It's a lossy media to say the least.

We've worked with a few different cathode materials, as well as a few shell coatings. We find a small amount of secondary electron emission to be good, a lot is bad. I use carbon for the ends (a very low emission coefficient) and right now, tungsten for the grid/lens rods. We also tried thoriated and otherwise doped tungsten that has higher electron emission, and it didn't work as well, since they are emitted at about the worst possible place, and most simply fly to the tank walls and generate waste heat. You need a few, and it seems a few more than the free ones you get from ionizing a neutral gas, but not many.

We don't notice a lot of X rays from electrons just voluntarily trying to hit something fantastically electrically charged to repel them. We do see them from the walls, and using a high Z coating for the walls makes it far worse.

The tank (anode) of course is at ground, mostly for safety of the operator (and the pumps and other plumbing). This has absolutely nothing to do with heat generation. As mentioned above, the fast electrons bashing the anode heat it up just fine, it's a major problem to keep it cool if you want to keep any D embedded in it.

FWIW, the answer to "has this been covered" and much of it has - is called the search function of this board. You might want to view some actual experimental results before talking about theory that doesn't hold in the light of actual observations. You might even then know we don't do spherical fusors here at all, but cylindrical ones (well, kind of) in the 6x6" sidearm of a much larger tank, and that we've set all records of late, blowing the sphere guys off due to the fact we can make an accurate cylindrical lens (line focus, no limit on length) vs a sphere which cannot be tiled with any shape that leads to a good focus in the center and is limited at best to one point.

I'd suggest that in a mixed charge and mass situation people revisit Newtonian mechanics before talking virtual cathodes. It's ridiculous on the face of it - the light, negatively charged electrons that would make one up, repel one another out of the position you'd want, and fly towards the attracitve positive ions - there's this small matter of an 1836*2 difference in mass involved. Which moves more, the lighter or the heavier, given equal forces. We've probed and looked - sorry, the BS from the armchair guys is simply wrong.

FWIW, we've also measured zero confinement, and darned little (fraction of a percent) recirculation. Did I say the all-important word MEASURED? Talk is cheap. There are plenty of sites for that. We're not one of them. We do things here, then report on the actual results. Speculation is only favored when we are trying to explain how a measured result occurred. And at that point, if the experiment was well setup and designed, it usually takes very little to see how it all fits into established science and models in hindsight.

We are NOT trying to simply duplicate Farnsworth, Hirsch, Meeks, or anyone. We're trying to make this work, they failed at that. I have to compliment them for being honest. They saw the odd outlier and super high output but reported it as such as they lacked the data acquisition to know the exact circumstances to replicate it - so they called it an oddity. We don't have that limitation here, and can now say they were being honest - there really are some interesting modes that put out lots more than usual, and now we know how to replicate them at will. That's science -if you can't replicate it, it's junk. If all you do is talk, that's worth even less.

QM doesn't really get involved in what we do till the nuclei are within around a femtometer. We can't of course manipulate any force other than EM, so all we're really doing is setting up the conditions where those super short range forces can take over.

IEC is an utter misnomer, FWIW. There is no confinement at all going on (well, the tank walls keep the shop air out), it's a beam collider, and nearly all the involved particles are once through and out.

We have a recursive system here that makes the Mandebrot set look simple. Math has gone from being the queen of science to at most, the barmaid. There are no solutoins to even the three body gravitational problem (other than perturbation which has its own limits that are shockingly severe). We have a far more complex system here, with perhaps 1017 particles, various charge mass ratios and polarities...there is simply no hope of simulating this before the heat death of the universe with math we have and any computer that will be built before then.

Get thee to a lab boy, and learn some things. Idle speculation is a simple waste of time that could be more profitably used doing a real experiment and measuring something that hasn't yet been. And know some EE and regular science first, don't go straight to QM which, while critical, is all so short range we're not working with that directly, only trying to improve some probabilities things will be close enough for it to take over. Just at the guys who build fission reactors don't control the weak force or the strong whatsoever. They just pile up the right stuff in the right arrangement and let nature take its course. So do we, though there is more detail and precision involved to get two of our projectiles to hit as unlike with uncharged neutrons, we only get pretty much one shot per input acceleration. We hope to improve the reaction rate at the "focus" via better luminosity there, due to focus and bunching. We'd like to pay attention to the well-established conservation laws along the way, as failing to do so doesn't work out well.

Some books, also mentioned elsewhere on the board that might help you get up to speed if you're neither too lazy or too cheap:
Radio Engineers' Handbook by Frederick Emmons Terman, 1943 first edition - out of print but often available at Amazon or used book stores. Covers pretty much all of EE, including calx for resonators and waveguides, as well as the best work on electron optics I've managed to find - and charged particles are charged particles, given a E/M fudge factor for a particular one.

Inertial Electrostatic Confinement by George H. Miley and S. Krupakar Murali - ISBN 978-1-4614-9337-2 Name should be obvious. It would be better if they gave data under more realistic conditions. Somehow they manage to skip over the entire operating regime fusors tend to run in....Some good info on older ideas of Farnsworth and some new speculations, a little math that might reasonably be extrapolated if you take a lot of things they don't bother with into account (at low volts and high pressure, things are just different in odd ways, like scattering).

Quadrupole Mass Spectrometry edited by Peter Dawson ISBN 1-56396-455-4 Pretty good basics on how charged particles act in DC and RF fields, and a really good introduction/visualization of the Mathieu equation - which is what we are working with, only we add a couple of variables to even that hairy stuff (space charge for example).

No one really has "the book" which is what we are writing here - and which is why random speculation is discouraged. It ruins and dilutes the real facts of actual observations made by members here. This is a learning resource, not facebook or G+. Gabbing, we have another forum for, called the water cooler that gets auto-erased unless one of the mods makes a topic sticky. Those are really distinct parts of this place, and the book section (the rest) is why we get so many hits from the search engine bots. Once they can't find something on wikipedia, they come here. When you post, try and keep that in mind. You should also hit the "introduce yourself" thread so people know who they are talking to, and don't go over or under your head too badly.
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.
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Re: Reading up on Farnsworth

Postby ScottMc » Sun Nov 02, 2014 5:23 pm

Doug, thankyou for your time in reading and responding. I appologize for the theory nature of the post, not my intent. My background is theoritcal physics. To me the quantum aspect of electrons is very relevent to the operation and goal of fusion, even under simple targeting. You are right in that actual experimentation is more helpfull then theory, but it does help to have a plan layed out and the parameters known in order test said theories. So just recently i was approached and given funding to start on research in fusion, great however I do move forward with trepidation. There has been mountains of work done ahead of me for half a century, lots of roads traveled and dead ends met. In digging into the various topologies, they all are very similar. Then we get to Farnsworth work and his has some peculiarities and also a fair amount of mystery shrouding it. I've also worked for big brother and have seen and been part of some truely odd projects that will never see the light of day, the point is of what I know on some things would really help the private sector but it's not possible to share or enlighten so delay and stumbling in the dark continue. To think that a similiar type of restriction isn't in place with respect to this type of work is ignoring how politics shape the world.

My point wasn't to get into politics and faceless boogeyman. I don't want to repeat and loose time nor waste funds on deadends. Also everything I do will without a doubt be shared. So when I went over the work of Farnsworth to sort fact from fiction I was half expecting to find the useall std approach with iterations and refinements, but parsing out the virtual shells and the inside out structure was like finding a small treasure. I ofcourse make the leap into QFT and apply what his approach was and get a unique approach to fusion. If it's and that's the BIG if, if it works with utilizing virtual shells then it would be similar to a 'beam on beam' target approach but with out physical conductors getting in the way. Theory I know.

Spherical wave guide is an oxymoron, my intent was not to coorelate to RF guides, I just don't know how else to explain a counterspacial e-field director in terms that make sense in our physical universe, possibly but that of course gets into LQG. I'll try and refrain from more of that. What my goal is, is to try and layout a design utilizing the theory of quantum field physics instead of the particle notation of classical. Is it possible, I don't know. I'm going to try though.

It's been couple yrs but i did post in the introduction thread. My failing is trying to explain my thoughts conscisly without getting into deep waters, where I can get lost as well. Only advantage I have is a friend who did spend 20yrs in fusion research but of the magnetic confienment variety back inthe 70's. He's very intrigued with this model but also enjoys his retirement.
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Re: Reading up on Farnsworth

Postby Doug Coulter » Sun Nov 02, 2014 10:25 pm

Well, the first nM is the easy part. That last FM is where QM wavefunction is "stronger" than Coloumb. There is iffy experimental evidence the Klein paradox and excess electrons help for that last factor 1k of distance.
I've sadly learned that much of what is called theory is full of incorrect unstated assumptions and sins of omission.

You just have to get into the lab. Due to the many-body insolubility, it turns out the universe is its own best model, and runs in real time. Most theory assumes that since you've really studied one ant, you understand colonies, and how they fit into the ecosystem. As Pauli said...not even wrong. You'll find this out, I hope.
Existing theory is, at best, descriptive not prescriptive...and forgetting that almost killed me the other day, with 84 billion n/s when I expected a mere few tens of millions...been working on shields and remote control ever since. No point in losing my life, but it's boring compared to running.
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.
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