The heat won't hurt you unless it breaks something on the tank (melts a seal, breaks a window, or burns a viton gasket). Mine regularly gets to molten solder temperatures -- a couple hundred C. Helps bake off the water and other junk in the tank, actually -- and so maybe you should run enough to get hot, then pump and re-fill and try that. It's a better bakeout than you can usually contrive any other way.
Higher voltage is far more effective than higher current. At a
million neutrons/second, it only takes picoamps of interacting ions....You are lucky your interaction rate is so low! Your safety officer would be having kittens otherwise. Maybe three-eyed ones with lasers on their heads.
The good stability I see in that video indicates a fair amount of impurity in the gas, at least from experience here. When the gas gets real pure, there's some flickering and instability usually.
But it looks like you're getting everything right, and should do (insanely) better once you can get to lower pressure and higher voltage. We are just well out of the detector noise at the speeds and feeds you're running now. At the speeds and feeds I run -- I get 1-3khz out of the
3He detector on neutrons -- with no other changes to anything. I am generally running 40 something kV and usually 7-10 ma. Or in other words, about the same wattage input, but for a heck of a lot more fusion.
The output seems to be very much a function of how fast the ions hit. More gas (as needed for lower voltages) means they collide too much with neutrals on the way in to ever get up to a good speed, and the low energy collisions don't make fusion. Lower voltages mean they don't get to good speeds even if they get lucky and miss the other junk before getting to the interaction zone.
- Board doesn't do tables well, had to make one and do a screenshot...click to expand
As you can see, even at the lower pressures I'm telling you to try, there are plenty of atoms in the about 1cc interaction zone (and there's more there than elsewhere anyway).
But if an ion makes just one collision on the way in (or out) -- you lose half the input energy to a useless collision. See the numbers above.
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.