i _did_ a number of simulations that showed this. the alphas are well contained electro-statically. which i suppose is not all too surprising. you're essentially making an inside-out atom, except the orbiting particles have much higher mass, and the center is 'fuzzy', so to speak, so you don't have quantum uncertainty and interference effects causing the probability waves to cancel out in the inside, and what you get is more like what classical physics predicts the structure of the atom to be (prior to bohr) - except the center has essentially zero volume, so the system doesn't mechanically collapse... etc.TallDave wrote:I think you're referring to this:
I assume you meant to say the coil casings are spaced, not the cusps. The idea seems to be that since the electrons are going out the cusps anyway, best to keep the casings out of their path.Design, building and parametric testing of WB-
7 and WB-8, the final two true polyhedral coil systems, with
spaced angular corners, to reduce “funny cusp“ losses at the
not-quite-touching points, and yet provide very high B fields
with conformal coil surfaces. These would be topologically
similar to the original WB-2 and PZLx-1, but without their
excessive unshielded surface losses, and with pure
conformal coils and small intercept fractions. These latter
can be achieved by appropriate spacing between the corner
junctions (typically several gyro radii at the central field
strength between adjacent coils) to allow free circulation of
electrons and B fields through the “funny cusp“ regions,
without direct B field line impact on or intersection with the
coils themselves.
But remember, the electrons are trying to get to the Magrid; that's why they spiral along the field lines. The alphas, otoh, want to get away from the Magrid. A simulation would be good to see, but I think they'll tend to bounce off the regions of stronger field/charge and head along their merry way.
and my sims clearly showed electrons are hot on the outside and cold on the inside, whereas for ions its reversed. the reasons being straightforward and elementary : the electrons are effected by the magnets, which are on the outside. and the ions by the electrons, which are on the inside. by the time an ion makes it to the magrid, chances are it had barely enough energy to get there, and its kinetic energy now is nearly zero and its about to fall back into the core. so like i said the sputtering there is minimal. but dan mentioned the fusion ions - the products of a fusion reaction - and those ofcourse will have very high energies from the get go and their initial direction will be pretty much random. so i'd say the default scenario is you lose as much of their energy to collisions to the thickest part of a the magrid covers a sphere centered at the origin. and that product ion KE is your power output. so if your final power out is 90k and the grid covers 10% of the spherical surface area, that means the grid is absorbing 10k worth of kinetic energy from the product ions. and i imagine in high power systems, that could be pretty substantial. to the point where you'd have to worry about the lifetime of the coil casing and how hot it gets from these collisions. and the latter esp. if you're using superconducting magnets.
