Talk-Polywell.org

Strikes me as ludicrous delay, if they think it’s real.

Can’t disagree with any of that, but I can’t square it with the charts on the recently linked site showing the satellite speeding up.

The notes ‘about thus data’ seem to disclaim any accuracy. I’m going to focus on the Norad data.

Giorgio wrote: ↑

Wed Jan 31, 2024 6:30 pm

The orbit is becoming more circular and less ellipsoid as it encounters resistance in the upper atmosphere, a normal behavior.
Its either not working or still not turned on.

What you say matches the Norad data but not the Barry website. At least at first blush…

Scratching my head - the Barry data shows t he e satellite altitude falling and velocity increasing, until recently, when velocity seems to have peaked gracefully and altitude similarly bottomed. The norad data linked earlier shows the SMA continuing to decline, along with the eccentricity. Not unde...

Have Helion said how much D & He3 constitutes the reaction plasma? I know they have a patent which discussed relative concentrations, especially hypothesizing that it might be possible to create as much He3 from DD reactions as lost in DHe3 reactions. Based on that we can probably work out the total...

Roughly my thought. And it doesn’t have to be fast. If they can exhaust the fusion plasma in a few milli-seconds over a distance of a few metres, then it’s perhaps 1/300 the velocity of the original FRCs. Sounds like not a prohibitively powerful pulse. I have no real idea what happens when the exhau...

Right now I’m willing to trust them that they can make a 50MW plant work. The internet seems to think that capacitors can have really enormous power densities, kind of supporting that. My perspective is that the low core utilisation is a huge opportunity: if it really is busy for a few percent of th...

Ok.

Presumably yield is strongly related to B, so it seems quite unlikely that a generator targeting low-Q will produce a remotely similar yield per pulse with the mag field down by a third.

The penny finally drops as to why they recently added DT to their program.

Ok, feels like closing in. Polaris runs at 0.1 Hz+. If each pulse is like the power plant, it would be net 5MJ, up to 45MJ in and 50MJ out net of losses. So 500kW is ball-park power if each pulse is as good as the final design. So expectation must be lower. You mentioned a light-bulb would do, but i...

The capacitor bank can hold 50 MJ, how much of that is input power and how much of it is fusion power is a bit of a mystery. I hear that the target Q is around 2. But all of that has been in a bit of a flux lately. Not entirely clear if that's Polaris or the power plant. If it's the plant at 50MW i...

mvanwink5 wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 12, 2024 5:39 pm

Remaining gasses have to be evacuated after the pulse, and their patented high volume vacuum pump is key to doing this fast.

Thanks, I should have realised!

HERT: So 1Hz, circa 50 MJ in, say 55 MJ out, is 5MW. yes but unfortunately it's only 5MW for 1ms, which is not very useful… No, I don’t think so. If its producing a net 5MJ in each pulse, and doing one pulse per second, thats 5MW: a Watt is a Joule per second. What is strange is that the core seems...

So 1Hz, circa 50 MJ in, say 55 MJ out, is 5MW. Is that right? Avenues to higher power out are increasing the pulse rate - maybe with additional capacitor banks - or increasing Q, or increasing pulse size (power in at constant Q). As Talldave alludes to, increasing pulse rate does seem a very attract...

Call me pedantic, but saying they won’t hit beakeven this year when it’s December 26 isn’t breaking my heart…

Calculating drag was my first thought as well, in fact I think I did it before probably elsewhere here. Then I realised orbital mechanics should be able to translate height into speed, and we have the decay rate of height from the chart. Hence deceleration. I started from v^2/r = g ~constant, and di...