Talk-Polywell.org

One major difference between going up and reentry: for reentry you want the airframe to act as a drag device, preferably heavy on form drag and light on skin drag. One factor I've heard in the X-30 concept was cooling the airframe with the fuel going to the engine. Without such a store of liquid fue...

Sketching up what's described, I see a single set of field lines around both magnets, centered closed to the stronger outer magnet. If I'm seeing laksindiaforfusion's idea correctly, we might do as well with a single magnet of oblong cross section, the cross section major axis tilted towards the cor...

MSimon wrote:There are also a couple of definitive problems to solve with B11. Like how to feed the B11 into the reaction space.

diborane, B2H4. a bit extra hydrogen for the reaction, but what I've read says you want that anyway.

If we allowed the first wall on the magrid to operate at 1-2000Kelven, how much radiative cooling might we expect?

Presuming power output limited to R^2 by cooling requirements, how would reactor mass scale? For many space apps volume isn't a killer.

So where does the Wiffle Ball Effect come from? Without the plasma inside the magnetic field inside the magrid makes smooth arcs, the field being shaped rather like a funnel around the center of each magnet. When the plasma presses hard enough on the interior of the magnetic field the field lines a...

Re. the electron path in a wiffle ball: Given the diamagnetic effect of the electron cloud, magnetic field beyond a short distance inside the electron cloud approaches zero. I'm thinking a reasonable approximation of electron path might be electrons bouncing off the electron cloud / magnetic field i...

What makes you think the greenies won't go ballistic over several GW of microwaves being beamed to earth?

People are not rational. One plot element I've seen more than once in 'Saturday morning cartoons' and similar grade fiction is a 'fusion reactor' threatening to go critical and detonate, vaporizing an area ranging from a few city blocks to a whole city. We know that the fuel in the core is too limi...

Fundamental symmetry. The problem with tokamaks, mirror machines, stellerators and all that is a lack of simple symmetry. A very weak argument without apparent foundation. The polywell differs in a few primary aspects I see: - The polywell confines electrons with the magnetic field but not ions. El...

Doing idle research I came across http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/CDReadyMJPC ... 3_4827.pdf
EFFICIENCY IMPROVEMENTS FOR IEC FUSION IN A PENNING TRAP BY ELECTRON RECIRCULATION

I have doubts the polywell is on congresses radar yet. But if we get positive results out of WB7 I wouldn't be surprised to see them stepping on each other to claim early support.

If someone wants a challenge, look at writing the simulator to run on a modern video card. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU The fairly simple code running on a massively parallel dataset of vectors might be a good fit.

Since we're circling back to the Rider paper yet again, it seems as if that paper makes three fundamental arguments against IEC: 1) That electron losses eat up too much power. ... 2) The chances of ions in the population gaining enough energy through elastic collisions... 3) ...bremmstrahlung... 1)...

The error bars from the few neutrons counted in the WB6 experiment are far larger than any good scientist or engineer could like. WB7 should resolve that problem with much higher quality and quantity of data. I want the polywell to work. Until we get the data we can't really be sure.

Indrek, looking at the animation of simulation results, the cusps where coils kiss don't look like they're leaking, something I was a bit concerned about. That being the case, struts between the coils WB6 style look reasonable. Could we get plots of electrons passing through various cross sections? ...