Just added some Boraxo (sodium borate) to my washing machine, and now there's a strange blue glow emanating from it as it spins...chrismb wrote:So 'velocity' is spread only within a single order of magnitude for fusion, and represents no more than a table-top sized device operating at 1 to 5MHz rotation. Seems like it would be a very useful option, to me, even if it turns out not to be 'the best' or 'most powerful' of several future solutions to fusion.
Seriously, 6 ft diameter at 5MHz rotation gives a tangential speed of 17849 mi/sec (~0.1 c). Not as bad as I thought. The rotating charges constitute a solenoidal current with resulting magnetic field. Forces on a wire solenoid are radially outward (coil bulging) and longitudinally inward (compression along axis, less toward the ends). Would there be a resulting push of ions to the outer wall, beyond that due to centrifugal force or applied E field, and a tendency for ions to move towards the mid-plane (perpendicular to axis), or would plasma dynamics and relativity conspire against this?
Several years ago I was researching Ranque-Hilsch vortex tubes for possible application to heat engines. A high pressure airflow injected tangentially at one end will, in a properly designed vortex tube, result in a (rather inefficient) "Maxwell's demon" separation of flow into a hot vortex along the tube inner wall and a reverse-flowing cold vortex along the axis. I don't have that research handy (it's in storage far from here), but one of the papers I found reported a Russian vortex tube experiment that produced a record-low cold flow and was associated with a blue glow coming from the tube, and possibly a humming sound. Wish I could remember the details...