Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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ladajo
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by ladajo »

That could be. But I do think they are VERY careful what words get onto the reports. They must know folks are watching them as one of the only few trickles of information. But at eh same time they are constrained to meet contract reporting requirements, and thus must put something.
In any event, I am more inclined to think that given the injection issue they have had to deal with, that the project plan has been modified. My gut feeling is that this contract will be run out in order to cement D-T. Then once they have that in their pocket, along with an argument (one way or the other) about pB&J, they will be well position to move on to a definative and solidly supported contract for the next phase. Be it DEMO, or a pB&J study, or even both. I would hope for both. The current work proves out D-T, and they say lets go full scale with it. Bird in the hand so to speak. To wit; "As we do that, we will stand up another team to do further study on pB&J (because as we showed you in this just completed work it is worth pulling the string as well)."

One thing I know for sure, is that the current funding drama is real and dangerous. If they keep funded, it means that they are doing something worthwhile. If you think it is not, then you need to ask the federal workers about the 20% cut in work hours they are imminently facing as a money saving measure. And that is but one part of the money cuts. The navy is not joking around. This is a Big Deal
The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
What I want to do is to look up C. . . . I call him the Forgotten Man. (Sumner)

mvanwink5
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by mvanwink5 »

I thought last year would field the tell of success, but it didn't. The sole source two sentences that gave us some positive insight seemingly only gave EMC2 science project study money to deal with the injection issue, which, pathetically, Bussard himself already said would be a problem with the small Polywells. Why there would be any surprise there to EMC2 / Navy is hard to wrap my head around without a conspiracy theory (that I use only as jokes). :roll: Sorry about that rant. 2013, it is then.

Private space trip to mars will likely happen before these guys field Polywell even if it was served on a sesame seed bun. :roll:

PS I deleted the BHO rant about the fiscal and military, etc. situation.
PSS I couldn't help myself, what is the chance that DC house prices will ever be affordable again, know what I am saying?
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

ladajo
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by ladajo »

I agree about the foresight both Bussard and Nebel had regarding small scale limitations with the physics.
I too have wondered on this some.

I think your issue housing costs in DC relates more to the ability to live in 'safe' areas. If you want to live cheap, you can. You just need to accept that the folks around you are probably going to rob you or hurt you to further their own lot. After all, it is your taxes that keep them afloat without having a real need to perform. The folks that want to live safer need to pay out of pocket to do so. As a friend of mine once bluntly put it, "paying that much for a house is the only way I can garauntee my neighbours.". Of course, to help put it in context, he bought into a very high end development, because he knew that even the previously "safe" nicer developments were no longer safe due to the sub-prime zombie plague.
My own nice upper end neighbourhood at the time even fell a little victim to this. It is one of the reasons we moved, but now rent out the home. But now, at least those few elements that managed to sub-prime their way in, and bring their lack of respect for fellow people and crime with them have now all been foreclosed out. Corrospondingly, the neighbourhood crime rates have magically gone back to essentially zero. And what little that does happen is from a small few high school kids seeking to figure out who they are.
The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
What I want to do is to look up C. . . . I call him the Forgotten Man. (Sumner)

mvanwink5
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by mvanwink5 »

Pushing the injectors, in my mind, only makes sense if the goal is to get engineering data for a DD or DT demo using the WB-8.0. Remember that plasma diagnostics paper we saw, what was it, a year ago? So, the improved WB-8.0 diagnostics and what that data would be used for (demo engineering) then may be key to staying with WB8.0 for more testing. Of course the contrary negative view might be that some things looked dubious and they just wanted to clear those doubts before progressing with big money. Either way, it looks like crossing the big money barrier is the common issue with both above scenarios. The only big money barrier is demo money, and that seems to be alluded to in the famous "sole source memo." Then given your point on current DC budget money battle in play, iron clad results would seem to be imperative to get big 2014 money. Hence, bigger injectors, super diagnostics, and lots of data. I always used to say, proof is expensive (cost of postponed benefit), but 2013 fall is not far.
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

Robthebob
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Re:

Post by Robthebob »

happyjack27 wrote:
jcoady wrote:
This is multiplied by the cusp confinement to get the "thousands of passes" confinement of charged particles (electrons)- ie: the Wiffleball trapping factor.
What would the electron charge density look like inside the Wiffleball. Is it expected to be evenly distributed inside the Wiffleball or would it be expected to be higher near the outer wiffleball radius.
my sims suggested the electrons form a sort of hollow sphere in the center (which spikes at the cusps). this makes sense, given gauss' law; a "hollow sphere of charge", as it were, represents a minimum-energy state. i believe this would suggest that the electric potential well is squarish at the bottom. some of the electrons would be part of this hollow sphere, some would cancel out the protons' charge density.
Oh? while this might be able to explain WB effect by ballooning instability because the pressure gradient is radially outwards (from dense to not dense inwards), this suggests that the core may suffer from R-T fluid interchange. Or at least at the core, the magnetic curvature is "bad".

Edit: scratch that, I think the idea of good or bad magnetic curvature is only applies when the plasma is in the B field. I think we can all agree that most of the electron is at the core of the machine, which has really low field.

I still believe that what happened all those years ago in other cusp machines is the same as WB effect, but those might not be ballooning instabilities as once thought, not in the same way as in convex fields ballooning out.
Throwing my life away for this whole Fusion mess.

TallDave
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by TallDave »

Which means IMO that WB is proven.
Yes, I think the comments on confinement made that pretty clear as far back as WB-7. As Rick said, they can maybe live without ion focus, but without WB confinement they have nothing worth pursuing here and we should all move on.

viewtopic.php?p=4940&highlight=#4940
However, the wiffleball mode is essential and the ion convergence simply makes things better. If we can’t get the wiffleball, then we can kiss our behinds goodbye. That’s why we are focused on achieving the wiffleball and we aren’t paying any attention to Rider and Nevins. They’re just a distraction. Does this kind of make sense?
n*kBolt*Te = B**2/(2*mu0) and B^.25 loss scaling? Or not so much? Hopefully we'll know soon...

DeltaV
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by DeltaV »

New NAWCWD PDF.
http://www.navair.navy.mil/nawcwd/nawcw ... il2013.pdf

Changed amount and end date?

pg 2:

CONTRACT NUMBER
N68936-09-C-0125

CONTRACTOR
ENERGY/MATTER CONVERSION CORPORATION

COMP
SS

AWARD
$ 17,554,409

END DATE
9/10/2014

DESCRIPTION
Research Development Test Evaluation (RDT&E) Plan Plasma Fusion (Polywell) project for research, analysis, development, and testing to validate the basic physics of the plasma fusion (polywell) concept as well as requirements to provide the Navy with data for potential applications of polywell fusion with a delivered item, wiffleball 8 (WB8) .

mvanwink5
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by mvanwink5 »

Thanks DeltaV.
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

Robthebob
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by Robthebob »

did i read that right? 17 million? like new dollars or including stuff from before or what?
Throwing my life away for this whole Fusion mess.

DeltaV
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by DeltaV »

That's my question too. I recall seeing a similar number before, but T-P search yields nothing.

There was talk upstream about the end date going to 2013 from 2014.

D Tibbets
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by D Tibbets »

Electron density, energy and distribution in the Polywell has been argued repeatedly. There are papers at Askmar that presents the thoughts of the principle investigaters on this issue.

Basically my un derstanding is that in WB6 the injected electrons were mostly (not totally) radial initially, decellerating as they approached the center and then accelerating twords the edge where they are turned by the magnetic field, mostly by completeing 1/2 og a single gyro orbit. No spiralling of these electrons. This may change with time but this involves a different population of electrons. Dolan's review paper from 1993 mentions the three populations of electrons in the magnetically shielded Fusor concept. The free electrons bouncing around within the Wiffleball, the electrons trapped on field lines and exiting cusps or diffusing to magnet surfaces, and cold electrons trapped in cusps , partially due to electron repellers just outside the cusps. We know what happened when EMC2 tried repellars in WB5, so the thoughts/ benifits, etc. have evolved since then.

Bussard (and Art Carlson) pointed out that the pure electron cloud quickly formed a square potential well. This means that many of the electrons were near the Wiffleball edge in either near circular orbits- glancing off the Wiffleball border, or trapped on field lines. The ions see the potential well only whey they are a (very?) short distance outside this preponderance of electrons. Once accelerated inward past this electron "shell" the ions are coasting due to Gauss Law effects. This changes with ions though because the ions tug a small percentage (?) of the electrons towards the center. This redistributes the electrons to a pattern closer to the first few micro seconds after injection. The average electron trajectory is more parabolic/ elliptical with the minor radius of the orbit closer to the center. This creates the stable ( duration for milliseconds which is longer than the electron lifetime) parabolic potential well. The ion acceleration profile is thus modified, most of the acceleration is still near the edge, but due to the presence of proportionally more electrons deeper, the acceleration is integrated over a longer gradient. The spherical geometry and the dwell time of the electrons in each each incremental radii enters into the picture . Additional potential well structures like shelves, multiple vertual anodes, etc. might manifest.

As Bussard liked to say the situation is dynamic and applying static pictures can be miss leading.

And,the Wiffleball is not an instability or pulsation. It is by definition steady state. Due to B field curvature the pressure inflation forms a stable boundary that avoids MHD instabilities. Of course steady state is relative. Fluctuations can be introduced by twisting knobs, and such may be useful, or not.

Dan Tibbets
To error is human... and I'm very human.

Betruger
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by Betruger »

Has (what seems like) Askmar's latest pdf been discussed already? Dated December 2012:
http://www.askmar.com/Fusion_files/2012 ... usions.pdf
RESULTS AND FINAL CONCLUSIONS

Results of the experimental and analytical work conducted during the program now ending have shown all of the conclusions necessary to support and define the next step to full-scale net fusion power demonstration. These include:

1. No closed box machine can ever yield net fusion power; open recirculating MG machines and systems are required. This is an immutable result of the determination of losses of electrons in experiments, that show that losses to surfaces that are NOT magnetically shielded must be kept to less than 1E-5 or so of the cusp axis flow of electrons in the WB effect at beta = one.
[...]

2. The inescapable conclusion is that all polyhedral Polywell® machines must operate as open recirculating devices, and that all such systems must have essentially no B-fieldunshielded surface area available to electrons in the machine, itself
[...]

3. Because of this, it is also evident that – no matter their individual plan form shape (i.e. circles, squares, triangles, polygons etc.) – magnet coils must not touch at their adjacent corners, but must be spaced sufficiently far apart to ensure that no B fields intersect their containers.
[...]

4. Operating as recirculating (MaGrid) machines means that there will be an external region between the machine and its containing exterior wall, in which Paschen arc breakdown can occur, unless both external electron and neutral gas density can be kept below some critical level.
[...]

5. This requires that the ionization (of neutral gas) density within the machine be very large relative to that outside; and this can be attained only by neutral gas injection directly into the machine, followed by subsequent very rapid ionization of this gas, before it can escape into the exterior region.
[...]

6. Thus, in small systems there is a big incentive to attempt to fuel the machine with ions injected from ion guns placed on cusp axes
[...]

7. Finally, in terms of practical limitations it was noted that the basic physics concept presumes magnet coils of near-zero physical cross-section, which touch at acute to right angles at the corners of the polyhedral-vertex boundaries on which they are supposed to lie
[...]

8. The only way to avoid this, with coils of realistic finite size, using realistic conductors (e.g. superconductors) is to space the coils a distance from each other, as described in (3),above, so that NO B fields intersect the coil container metal surfaces, but rather the field lines flow in parallel between the spacing at these corners.
[...]

9. These line cusp flow increases will operate in parallel with the cusp-confinement Gwb of the basic coil geometry, and will thus reduce the overall trapping factor to something less than Gwb
[...]

10. This has the consequence that the maximum electron density ratio that can be sustained between inside and outside will be equally reduced, and the outside density must be that much larger for a given interior density (as required for useful fusion output).
[...]

11. Once again, large machines will not suffer from these problems to any significant degree, but they will cost a great deal more. Costs tend to scale as the cube of the system size and the square of the B field. Thus, full-scale machines and their development will cost in the range of ca $ 180 – 200 M, depending on the fuel combination selected. These cost estimates closely reproduce those made throughout the USN program life, from its earliest work (1991) to its conclusion (mid-2006) including those made at interim reviews (1995, 1999). USNavy costs expended to date in this program have been approximately $ 18 M over about 10 years (2/3 in last 6 years).
You can do anything you want with laws except make Americans obey them. | What I want to do is to look up S. . . . I call him the Schadenfreudean Man.

mvanwink5
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by mvanwink5 »

$200 million exceeds the bureaucratic barrier. There must be a full sized machine built first proving it before such money can be justified to risk building it. Hence it will never be done by the catch-22 principle. Now, if it might be useful for testing nuclear bombs, that would be completely different. Or, if would require the employment of a thousand physicists for decades...
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

Stubby
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by Stubby »

maybe now they can get their website back up
Everything is bullshit unless proven otherwise. -A.C. Beddoe

KitemanSA
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Re: Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

Post by KitemanSA »

Stubby wrote:maybe now they can get their website back up
EMC2 has never had a website up as far as I can tell. EMC2FDC, the unofficial not-for-profit R&D money receiver has not been needed since the Navy began funding again.

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