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Discuss how polywell fusion works; share theoretical questions and answers.

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mattman
Posts: 459
Joined: Tue May 27, 2008 11:14 pm

Latest Polywell Post up

Post by mattman »

Hello All,

Explaining the Counter Argument is now up. The post walks you through Dr. Todd Rider's Work.

Feel Free to Disagree with Rider.

Feel Free to Disagree with this work.

Feel Free to subscribe.

The Last Post (12/26/10) is now up to 500 views worldwide. There were 67 page views today!

http://thepolywellblog.blogspot.com/201 ... rt-ii.html

chrismb
Posts: 3161
Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2008 6:00 pm

Post by chrismb »

A typo "Bussard stated that the fraction of unshielded surfaces had to be less than 3E-51" should be 3E5 [maybe - not read the reference but def not 51!]

D Tibbets
Posts: 2775
Joined: Thu Jun 26, 2008 6:52 am

Post by D Tibbets »

I recall the quote as being ~ 10e-4 to 10e-5, or 1/10,000th to 1/100,000th.

Also, figure 2 is misleading and , I believe labeled backwards. The Polywell should show a narrow bell curve centered on the disired fusion temperature. The thermalized plasma is more spread out. And, I believe, Maxwellian thermalized plasmas/ gas showe a slued Bell curve. The average temperature is below the mean temperature, so the graph should be pushed downward on the high energy side.

http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilk ... 4.pdf.xpdf

This has important consequences for thermalized machines like Tokamaks, where the average temperature is actually too low for optimized fusion, but the high energy tail do reach better fusion conditions. This is one reason only D-T fusion is considered possible in these machines. Aside from losses, thermalized machines have difficulty reaching temperatures for the average energy ions to fuse efficiently, so most of the fusion occurs in the relatively few ions at higher energies. Because of this, the easier D-T fusion fuel is the only one that can reach breakeven in these machines.

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

mattman
Posts: 459
Joined: Tue May 27, 2008 11:14 pm

I will make the corrections..

Post by mattman »

Chris & Dan,

I will make those corrections. It was supposed to be reference 1, not 51. The response to your points from November is ready. However, there is another post which should go up before then. That is nearing completion. I generally seem to work much slower than this web forum would like.

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