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Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 12:17 am
by MSimon
Posted at:

http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/2010/03/wb-d.html

and all the other usual places.

Image


WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 12:44 am
by Betruger
Can there still be reasonable doubt on Dr Bussard's neutron claims when the website says WB6 results validated? This is one of the sticking points with serious skeptics IIRC.

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 12:47 am
by Aero
re: the WB8 image. I make the box to be 7.8 meters on a side. What does anyone else get?

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 1:03 am
by joedead
Awesome. Simply awesome.


Has Rick posted anything lately?

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 1:07 am
by MSimon
joedead wrote:Awesome. Simply awesome.

Has Rick posted anything lately?
We shall see. I notified him.

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 1:20 am
by Tom Ligon
I just checked Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle's blog on MSNBC. Nothing new. Worth watching. Rick has used him as a portal before, and they apparently have a relationship of trust.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/

Who here has Alan's ear?

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 1:47 am
by MSimon
Tom Ligon wrote:I just checked Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle's blog on MSNBC. Nothing new. Worth watching. Rick has used him as a portal before, and they apparently have a relationship of trust.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/

Who here has Alan's ear?
I'll give him a shout. He has linked to my blog posts in the past.

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 2:06 am
by KitemanSA
ltgbrown wrote:Notice the m in MW is capitalized! Very exciting.
But also notice they are calling it WB D not WB9 as in the current contract. This might suggest that they are indeed seperate machines.

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 2:18 am
by KitemanSA
Tom Ligon wrote:The WB-8 drawing looks like a good 3D CAD rendering, maybe SolidWorks or a comparable package. I don't think that is for show, I think it from actual engineering drawings. I suspect it is a pretty decent representation of what they are running.
But it is missing a WHOLE lot of stuff. A small scale unit with 8x field almost certainly needs cooling, and there is no indication of that. No support systems. Looks like either 8 electron guns or maybe 8 ion guns. I don't see the ports you claim are aligned with the funny cusps.

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 2:18 am
by icarus
The WB-8 vessel looks over-engineered to me, from first glance. Not atypical of those research projects that regularly come out of academia. Probably got over 60 ports on it with 20-30 screws on each port flange ... 1800 possibilities for the high vacuum requirement to be compromised and expensive too.

Might be time to let some professional production/system engineers in and keep the thing moving forward before it gets bogged down in the details ... seen it happen before .... just saying.

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 2:21 am
by KitemanSA
Aero wrote:re: the WB8 image. I make the box to be 7.8 meters on a side. What does anyone else get?
How can you even begin to estimate the WB8 box size? There is absolutely NOTHING from which to draw a scale. Unless of course you mean the WB-D box which does look about that size.

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 2:22 am
by Aero
ltgbrown wrote:
Notice the m in MW is capitalized! Very exciting.
But also notice they are calling it WB D not WB9 as in the current contract. This might suggest that they are indeed seperate machines.
Do you suppose the military requirements imposed by the navy make WB-9 less than ideal for commercial power generation? Or maybe EMC2 just wants to develop some IP not tied to government contracts.

@ Kiteman: You should know me by now - Of course I am referring to WB D

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 3:34 am
by Tom Ligon
Icarus,

What is your complaint about all the bolt holes in the flanges about? Those are all ConFlats. The seal is via a copper gasket into which a pair of knife edges press, one from each face. They are inboard of the bolt holes. The bolts are out in the air and do not provide a leak path, they only hold uniform tension to seal the gasket.

I introduced EMC2 to residual gas analyzers. I think they still use the first one I bought. These are small quadrupole mass spectrometers, that identify the composition and amount of gas in the system. You can tell if it is leaking versus outgassing, and can identify the leak location by putting a snort of gas such as helium or argon near the suspected leak.

Yeah, all those ports were expensive, but more expensive is building the chamber and then realizing you need one you were too cheap to put in. With seven million bucks, I'd have put in all I wanted, and not worry that they cost a few hundred bucks each. The whole chamber was probably a couple of hundred grand at the outside.

The box edges have a row of ports on them. These line up with the points where the Polywell magnets come closest to touching. When we used to have the magnet cases welded together, this formed a line cusp called the "funny cusp". Apparently they intended to instrument this, maybe with charged plates to detect escaping particles.

For scale, if you can count the bolt holes, then compare to catalog drawings of standard ConFlat flanges, you can probably identify the diameter of some of the flanges, and use that for your reference.

Best news for a long time

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 3:38 am
by CherryPick
Issue 1: This is coming from an internal source from people who actually do the research. It is not speculation that anyone could write to the blogs and forums.

Issue 2: Bold and clear confirmation of progress. 200 M$ funding for WP D indicates that there is something worth of it. Is there already a contract? When does the years they talk about start and end?

Issue 3: Diagnostics is very important We need it for creating simulators that could then find best possible designs. We need it to understand why we fail if we fail. The worst case scenario for the mankind is that we reject a feasible concept because of a flaw in design.

Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 3:56 am
by zbarlici
from the emc2 website mission statement..

"Fusion R&D Phase 1 - Validate and extend WB-6 results with WB-7 Device:
1.5 years / $1.8M, Successfully Completed


gals and boys, it seems that engineering issues are the only ones left to work out!

I do believe now, that this piece of tech is monumental to the impending space age. Long as cooling issues don`t kill the project.