New simplifying approach -- beams

Yours and mine. This is where you can gas on about how you think the universe works. To a point, after that we'll expect you to actually test your stuff and report.

Re: New simplifying approach -- beams

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue May 24, 2011 4:38 pm

Well, I have no measurements that disprove your thesis, and as I've pointed out, what's going on in there is obviously (now that I have one to try and measure on) far more complex than any armchair theories I've seen here or at fusor.net, certainly.

I do however see decent evidence that quite a lot of the ions are produced partway down the accelerating well -- many right at the bottom. I don't see any evidence of any bunching into packets with broadband antennas and fast detectors (up to ghz resolution, and one of my gigs was tempest antenna design for electronic warfare). I looked for any periodic recirculation really hard -- and can't find it. I see no evidence of any bunching (other than into the rays) whatever, and I've been looking hard for it -- and even trying to create it with active drives -- which, when successful, vastly increases the Q I see - but only for as long as I drive the bunching, no after-ringing whatever. In fact, there's no mechanism I'm aware of that would produce it without external drive, but plenty of things to prevent it happening or staying if it is made to happen some way. Any charge separation in a plasma tends to self destruct pretty fast unless continually driven. I do measure extreme electron excess no matter where I put a probe in a fusor, even though they are continually driven to the walls. Most seem to be coming from hits on the grid, which has a nicely infinite supply of them. Grids that get less hits by whatever mechanism (for example, having less area to hit or giving better focus) reduce this measurably.

Whether you're right or not -- the sure thing is that it's so far so complex in there that no simple feed-forward explanation seems adequate, and we'll only do the old head-slap in hindsight after getting a lot more data than anyone yet has (that I know of). It could be that simple, dunno. Doubt it, but there's no real evidence either way at this point that I've seen. It's like trying to look at a starting pattern in Conway's game of "life" and predict what's going to evolve -- emergent behavior is always tricky in foresight.

After all, it only takes 6-7 very simple equations in few variables per cell to predict the weather accurately - but you'd never derive them by watching clouds and guessing. Even if you know them, I'm sure all are aware that you need to be able to do quite a lot of them very fast to simulate weather faster than the system itself does -- for a lot of things, the universe is its own best simulation, and it automatically runs real time.

This seems like a very similar problem -- but just working out the effects on one charge of all the others is a lot harder than the weather situation (eg things don't divide nicely into cell interiors that don't interact with other cells except at the edges), and that's only one of the equations you need. Looks like about the same problem here -- just different math, harder to do because of that non ability to divide the grid up and work only within one cell at a time. Or so the gents at SIMION said as well.

Which is the point of this direction change here. Rather than hoping that whatever equilibrium a fusor obtains will magically create whatever the best fusion conditions are seems like it's reached whatever limit there is on that without a lot more understanding, and probably some form of active input, rather than just letting it sit at equilibrium. In fact, quite a few experiments here show that practically anything that kicks it off the stable spot improves things till it all goes back - which happens quite quickly. Doesn't seem to matter much at this point what kicked it off -- magnetic pulse, field perturbation, whatever, even DC magnet with some weird orientation seems to help. It's as though the "stable" state of a fusor is actually the very worst case for fusion, though it acts like what the math guys call an "attractor" and the fusor "wants" to be in that state unless you kick it off of that.

Whether that's due to your proposed mechanism, some other one we haven't thought of yet, or the spins/selection rules kinds of things -- no clue at this time, I don't think anyone does have one. Hence the quest to find that out in the simpler system where I have a shot at it.
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Re: New simplifying approach -- beams

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed May 25, 2011 11:26 am

This is kinda what I'm visualizing as the stuff at the beam intersection point. Making this from the parts shown might fairly seriously stress my welding abilities. I have a button-head TIG, but it won't go down inside that size pipe, so I'd need to MIG from the outside or braze I guess. As well as fix up some kind of reducer for the bigger pump flange on the bottom. This really isn't as much port-age as I'd like to have, but it gets kind of cramped or I have to use a bigger cross to get more in. The idea is pump on bottom, beams in from the sides, window on front, wiggle stick on top (for target holders, moving a probe in the beam etc), electrical FT's on back, or something like that. In this case I'd have to run the thing at ground, with all the HV at the ends of the beam pipes, as I can't imagine floating a pump all that far off ground, and the complexities of floating it are ugly.
Beamlinemockup.jpg
Photo of spare parts to maybe be used for this approach
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Re: New simplifying approach -- beams

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue May 31, 2011 1:31 pm

It seems some of the ideas I've been thinking are "in the wind" right now -- interesting. I was only a little ahead of the curve.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/46114
So, in analogy to para and ortho hydrogen, are para and ortho (but within the nucleus) D also possible and manipulatable?


This one talks about 3-body forces in another context but is very interesting anyway -- none of my books mention the possibility at all, and it would have huge effect on some of the reactions we are interested in if true (And it seems to be).
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-phy ... rbon-.html

Looks to me like a potential breakthrough on all that "low hanging fruit" physicists skipped over when it didn't meet the requirements for a funding-fad...

Well, I control the funding for my project, and am getting ready to order the stuff for the beam system. Jerry found me a place to get an iso-63 to 2.75" cf, and I've already gotten that, so now all I need for sure is a 6 way cross and a couple tubing couplers for 1" quartz beam pipes...the rest is in our junk box already.
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Re: New simplifying approach -- beams

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Jun 08, 2011 11:54 am

I haven't been posting much on science the last few because I've not been doing much. Did a fusor demo for the guys I got the new car from, that's about it (and it ran perfectly from the start, neat). I have ordered the required parts for the new beam stuff and am just waiting to get them. I have a couple of things I want to try on the upstairs fusor before I steal its vacuum system for that, which will happen soon.

On the upstairs one, I'm set up to warp the field across the tank, and I need to play with that a little bit. I found out something there by accident (isn't that usually the way) awhile back. Unlike the big guy downstairs, the little guy has the HV coming in from a side, making it possible to have the grid out of line (not in the middle) as well as angled wrong, and it was ever so slightly when I first put it together. Result was crummy looking poisser and little fusion. Adjusting the grid position helped a lot, which I can do from outside due to the HV FT design (my own).

This seems to be "one of those" in the sense that getting it perfect is bad too, it seems there needs to be just a little gradient to make the thing run stable with whatever recirculation we get, but too much is bad too. I've set up a fake "tank wall" near one of the walls that I can adjust the potential on to play with this a lot easier, and once I do that - depending on what I find, I can retire that one at least until I get the pump driver project going enough to use those used little turbos we got. So, that's the state of things for the moment, and for now, I'm trying to recoup what that car cost me, and it's looking good so far...but it takes work and energy to do it that has to come from someplace - I ain't superman. Meanwhile I'm designing things for the beam system to try out.
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Re: New simplifying approach -- beams

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Jun 09, 2011 6:14 pm

OK, I have most of the parts for this now, so soon I'll be starting another thread about actually doing this, instead of merely discussing it (though we can still talk trash here).
BoBsystem.jpg
Parts pile


The idea here is beam pipes through tubing couplers out the left and right, window on top, wiggle (push pull turn) stick on the front, and multi-pin LV electrical feedthroughs on the back. The real high voltage will be on the ends of the glass/quartz beam-pipes. For the first go, I plan just one pipe, about a foot long, with the ion source out at the end. This will let us learn to do beams generally, test beam on target things, do diagnostics. There is a very good chance each side will wind up looking like a miniature version of what John Futter is running now, and for most of the same reasons. We'll want a magnet (at least) to do ion selection, and perhaps spin separation, as well as act as a place for electrons back-accelerated to have their own target other than the ion source. And of course a focused beam has to also be aimed, so it will have deflection plates and so on, with any focus voltages coming in through the sides of the beam pipes. There will be a few interesting fabrication details to come later, but you can see that I'm going to need to segment the glass pipes so as to get volts to lens elements and so forth. Hopefully we can run this in the e-6 or e-7 mbar range, at first on my already built up pfeiffer pump station (60l/sec) once I take the little fusor off it, later on those surplus pumps, once I complete the good driver for them.

The only viton will be on the beam pipes, for the couplers (shown) and the ends. The rest will be CF and bakeable.
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Re: New simplifying approach -- beams

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Jun 30, 2011 10:07 pm

While looking into how one might prepare beams of spin-up or spin-down deuterons (or anything with net spin) I came across this amusing article about the Stern-Gerlach experiments.
ptsg.pdf
Physics today article
(1.46 MiB) Downloaded 434 times


I'll bring the bad cigar....

Persistence, accident, luck -- yup, sounds about right.
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Re: New simplifying approach -- beams

Postby chrismb » Fri Jul 01, 2011 3:58 am

Just for interest, this patent application was published on USPTO yesterday:

20110158369.jpg
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Re: New simplifying approach -- beams

Postby Doug Coulter » Fri Jul 01, 2011 9:12 am

Don't you just love it when some jerk patents something they've not made actually work yet, just in case someone else makes it work? This "will" or "could" allow this and that - obviously it hasn't yet, but this guy thinks you'll owe him a piece if you make it work. Too many trolls on the planet. At least so far, no one seems to be on to the idea of the conservation laws. Hah.

BTW, I recall some prior art on this -- the picture triggered it. This system has already been built in some national lab, for other reasons. They were using the electrons to "cool" ions, and to allow a higher flux ion beam to exist without Coloumb-exploding for some non-fusion related experiment. So this is in the class of things where something has been known a long time, and by adding something like "in a computer" -- or in this case "for fusion" it's now patentable again. All you need is a few million dollars and a few years to show the USPTO some prior art to get it rejected....what a scam our IP "industry" has become.
Last edited by Doug Coulter on Fri Jul 01, 2011 11:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Remembered prior art
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Re: New simplifying approach -- beams

Postby Starfire » Fri Jul 01, 2011 10:57 am

;) true to form Doug! and I don't believe in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle either - not complete.
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Re: New simplifying approach -- beams

Postby chrismb » Fri Jul 01, 2011 11:55 am

I recognise [and do not implicitly disagree] with your dismal view on patents, Doug, but to be fair the guy might be prototyping it right now. Watching USPTO patenting these days, as I do, I can tell you that with '..method for fusion power generation..' in the title, it is going to get short-shrift with the examiners. This stuff doesn't wash anymore unless, of course, he's got some evidence to present them to show he's generated power with it!!..

The thing is, if someone else has been working on it and has figured out some 'missing secret sauce' that the invention needs to work properly, they need only patent that and they will then a) be able to challenge the first patent as having been 'not enabled' and have it dismissed, and b) then take 'control' of the tech themselves (because to execute it practically, it needs that secret sauce).

Whereas, if the patentor has fully disclosed a working example (whether prototyped or otherwise) then why shouldn't he have a right to be rewarded for his inventiveness? If you are going to bash your head against a brick wall for years making something work, there has to be some form of intellectual-property recognition at the end of it, else what's the motivation for trying?
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