Science/Engineering/Technical forums

Yeah, well... it's always like that. If I'm satisfied, and I'm not perfectly yet, then that will do for me. We know for sure we are making T and 3He, just how much is the issue I guess. I suppose we could calculate how much in a 12 min run at roughly 1 million neuts/second (about twice that many fusions) and see if the numbers jive. They'd never be perfect as there are other ways to make the 3 lines...but hard to figure that 5 line, though it could be DDH+ somehow I guess. At any rate, I'll just see what I see and post it here.

Doug Coulter wrote:They'd never be perfect as there are other ways to make the 3 lines...but hard to figure that 5 line, though it could be DDH+ somehow I guess. At any rate, I'll just see what I see and post it here.

That's a very good idea. By varying a D and H mix, you'd be able to control for the 3/4/5/6 distributions. If D:H mix variation doesn't change the 3/4/5/6 mass signatures, then I reckon that's a 99.9999% demonstration you're measuring fusion tritium. As you say, you are definitely making the stuff in some finite quantity, and with your clean kit it would be surprising not to be able to measure the trace after a good run. But you know the wider audience, Doug, both amateur and academia will nod and say 'so maybe you've got a tiny amount of triutum, so what' with your current plot, whereas with some through means (maybe as above) you could prove the measurable discrimination of T, and that should get a more interested response.

Well Cris, you may have been right, or not. Frankly, I'm a bit confused at what I just saw!

I did as suggested (but not your last comment, I have no pure H to work with) and found some highly interesting results we can all comment on. Since it kinda wound up looking like a tutorial on mass spectrometry, I'm going to be posting it under metrology as soon as the edits and uploads are finished - it's a lot of stuff to consider (and takes a computer awhile to chew on that much video and format convert).

Of course, I'm neither terribly fond of or worried about convincing academics here -- the people I want to convince at some point aren't going to care - the power company.