Talk-Polywell.org

Concerning ions reaching the Wiffleball border at the top of thier orbits/ occillations and seeing the magnetic field, these very slow speed ions would have small gyroradii and I wonder how they then escape being traped on a magnetic field line. Dan, an ion with a 0 velocity will have a 0 gyroradiu...

Betruger, thanks for re-posting. Do you know what I did wrong? Edits that I would recommend based on my understanding- Since electrons spend most of thier time twards the center of the potential well, I would draw more of them there rather than at the Wiffleball border. There is no electric field se...

Tibbets, 93143 (or anybody else, for that matter)-- I"ve been staring at your answers for a week now, and I think I finally understand (at least until I stop understanding again...) Does this picture make sense? http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgm57drr_84bb296d2 If this is right, I'd think that we'd ...

Why wouldn't you just generate your ions external to the magrid and inject them with just enough energy to get them repelled inward instead of outward? Same thing for the electrons, albeit with a fairly hefty amount of energy? Ions: I explained this above. Technically you could fire the ions in jus...

No - the way I've always understood it is that the ions are supposed to be formed at the edge of the wiffleball, where the magnetic field suddenly goes to zero. This results in the edge of the wiffleball featuring fast electrons being turned around by the magnetic field and slow ions being turned a...

The proposed ionization scheme I'm familiar with uses electron cyclotron resonance. This would be impossible to pull off inside the wiffleball because there's no magnetic field. You have to do it at the edge, at the very lowest. If you just let neutral-electron collisions do the job, perhaps ioniza...

You forgot to take into account the entry velocity in each shell when computing the residence time. Your calculation assumes acceleration from zero in each shell - not for the velocity, just for the residence time. Yup, you're right. Stupid math error on my part. What a delightfully counter-intuiti...

Am I correct to understand that at any given location, the force on an ion is just the net electrostatic force on it from the ions and electrons that exist between it and the center?(assuming the sphere approximation is acceptable) It following that any ions and electrons further from the core in e...

The average ion velocity/bulk energy aren't proportional to R to any power, at least not without an offset. Think about it - at the radial point of the turnaround, the average ion velocity is ZERO metres per second, implying a differential residence time (seconds per metre) of...? Are you trying to...

I'm wondering about the max ion density at the edge of the machine. Consider a spherical shell at some distance R from the center of the machine. I'd think that the ion density would be proportional to (relative time to traverse the shell) / (volume of the shell). The kinetic energy of an ion is pr...

The electrons are fast at the edge, and fairly slow in the core. They are slowest at the bottom of the well, which is not at the centre of the reactor but rather at some finite radius, where the ion focus begins to dominate the potential distribution and the virtual cathode starts to give way to th...

Tom Friedman apparently visited NIF and wrote about it in today's NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/opinion/15friedman.html Feeling the need to vent, I wrote the following letter to him: Mr. Friedman-- I'm very happy that you're giving some share-of-mind to fusion research. NIF is a modera...

This will not be good for polywell.

Probably doesn't do much good when you can get hits searching for "nuclear space fraud".

Magnetized Target Fusion MTF is said to be a combination of inertial and magnetic fusion. http://wsx.lanl.gov/mtf.html Thanks for the pointer. This is similar to what I was thinking about, but not exactly the same. First, MTF looks like it's an FRC scheme, rather than a spherical confinement. Secon...

drmike wrote:No, it's not stupid. Do a web search on "proton beam inertial confinement fusion". You will get several 1000 papers on the subject. It's just not likely to be cost effective.

Anybody doing anything with "spherical" B-fields to enhance confinement?