Film: The Polywell, Explained in 15 Minutes.

mattman · Post by **mattman** » Tue Nov 13, 2012 3:27 pm

This film explains the Polywell in 15 minutes. It is organized into 7 sections:

I - 0:00 Introduction
II - 1:23 The Geometry of Bussards Machine
III - 3:54 The Mechanism
IV - 9:13 Plasma Details
V - 11:55 Scale Up
VI -12:27 The Next Step
VII - 13:31 Citations

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLkQeiRJjJs&feature=plcp

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If you like, you can just watch the mechanism portion (6 minutes). The mechanism has been broken down into 6 steps:

I. 0:10 -- Electrons are emitted, fall to rings
II. 0:45 -- Electrons caught by rings
III. 0:56 -- Electrons trapped by rings
IV. 2:12 -- Cloud of electrons trapped
V. 3:17 -- Deuterium puffed in, ionizes
VI. 4:11 -- Ions fall towards cloud, hit, fuse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1V8BjcEm-o
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Anyone looking to hire a Polywell researcher?

SheltonJ · Post by **SheltonJ** » Fri Nov 16, 2012 10:57 pm

The video is nice, though narration might be helpful. The links given in the citations would be useful in the textual description of the video. Do you feel that it would be useful to explain how the scaling is expected to vary with the radius of the machine? How about the opportunity to burn hydrogen and boron and potentially employ direct conversion of the resulting alpha particles into electrical current?

happyjack27 · Post by **happyjack27** » Fri Nov 16, 2012 11:25 pm

And in each part of the scaling law, explain in detail the reasoning. E.g fusion volume grows with volume, which is radius^3... Etc.

Polywell in 20 minutes?

happyjack27 · Post by **happyjack27** » Fri Nov 16, 2012 11:37 pm

Being petty: the electron gyro-radii get smaller as the mag field increases in strength. The video shows them staying the same size.

Also, fwiw, my YouTube videos of my sims -- public domain. Feel free to use them where-ever, be it free or commercial, and theres no need to give credit. (happyjack27 channel on YouTube).

happyjack27 · Post by **happyjack27** » Fri Nov 16, 2012 11:48 pm

Also, i saw in the video: "ions approach a bell cure". from my sims, the ions do appear to go towards a quantumn equilibrium; that is, a superposition of all possible energy levels. Meaning you have everything from frozen ions in the center to fast ions bouncing back and forth at critical orbit.

What this means for the net power equation - well, the gross power is going to be a factor less, but I don't see that factor scaling with size or mag strength, so in the end it's asymptotically insignificant, no?

jcoady · Post by **jcoady** » Sun Nov 18, 2012 12:49 am

In your rate equation you have fusion power / hot volume. What is the hot volume?

In the Energy From Fusion / Hot Volume equation you have units of Joules/sec . This should be Joules/(sec * m^3) . You need to multiply the 4E-9 Joules Per Second predicted by the Hot Volume. I think the hot volume is supposed to be some small region in the center of the polywell where fusion is supposed to occur. What is the approximate size of the hot volume?