U of Wis paper on their fusor, diagnostics, and....read it!

[Doug Coulter]

Dan DT over at fusor.net posted a link to this paper. I'm having quite a time reading it so far, as I posted over there - turns out all the "crazy" stuff we measured and got considerable skepticism about was...exactly correct, and now verified by the "official" types with much better gear - though we got there first with cheaper stuff...

The paper is too big to put inline here (8.4 mb) but here's a link to it in our library:
http://www.coultersmithing.com/data/Fus ... ostics.pdf

I'm only on pg 45 so far, but from what I'm reading, it's pretty sweet vindication of our measurements of "no recirculation to speak of" which we did by looking for ringing on HV impulses via induced charge in probes, not the way they did it, but same results. (always good to see the same thing with two different methods, as well)

They also check us (which includes TylerC) on the apparent localization of neutron flux near the shell, because there's a fair amount of fusion localized there. Thus Tyler's bubble differential and my results with the fairly shabby "neutron single pixel camera". Could have either been beaming or localized neutron production near the shell, which would look like beaming to a very close detector.

That's just for starters. Now to read the rest. Nice to know I wasn't full of it (at least on this topic ).

[Doug Coulter]

Wow. This is the most important paper on fusors since Rider. No kidding, read the thing. Anyone doing a fusor or thinking about it needs both of these, and other than some practical knowledge of how to make things, can more or less skip all the rest.

I'm agreeing with all I see so far, with some very minor nits to pick with the analysis. And that's not from some theory in my head, but their actual measurements matching up with mine.

For one thing, trying to evap Ti with D present to pre-load it is just stupid, and no wonder they had flaking problems. TiH isn't that great a substance, and they way overloaded the Ti matrix. There are other simpler ways to put in the D later and in more the right amount, duh. But that's probably a case of them not being able to read all the literature, or know the trade secret stuff.

Their idea of how many wires on the grids...Frankly, transparency is the wrong unit to be measuring here. Spacing is the right unit, in terms of there being a sort of magic size that lets the counter-streaming be efficient. As I've tried larger and smaller grids, I need fewer wires on the smaller ones to be optimal - but at optimum, the spacing is the same, large or small, not transparency. So they get crap by using the wrong measure on that one.

The rest is gold (at least up to pg 185). Now I want one of them fido things. Woof!