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Focus Fusion

Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 2:17 am
by djolds1
Opinions about the general concept appreciated. Pure BS? Promising?

Duane

Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 4:01 am
by pstudier
Smells like BS to me. It is advocated by Eric Lerner of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Inc., see http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com . The wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lerner mentions that he does not believe in the big bang and has its own theory of cosmology. Google maps indicate that the address of this company is in a residential neighborhood, see long url . I don't have the patience to dig through the website, but I bet he never gives any numbers for density, temperature and energy confinement time to judge against a Lawson criteria. The claim of p-B11 fusion seems far fetched to me without evidence of a gazillion neutrons from D-D. :roll:

Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 8:51 am
by MSimon
Electrode erosion.

BTW do a search. This one has been beat to death.

Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 7:00 pm
by Roger
MSimon wrote:Electrode erosion.

BTW do a search. This one has been beat to death.
Yup. Strange cat that Lerner guy, VERY strange.

Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:14 pm
by Torulf2
Read this article by Jan S. Brzosko.
http://www.physicsessays.com/doc/s2007/ ... nds-bk.pdf
Here are lots of data: density, neutrons and scaling laws.
Among the results: Electrode erosion:: not limiting factor.

The theory presented in BB newer happened, is not from Lerner but from Hanes Alfven. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannes_Alfv%C3%A9n

Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 10:34 pm
by pstudier
Torulf2 wrote:Read this article by Jan S. Brzosko.
http://www.physicsessays.com/doc/s2007/ ... nds-bk.pdf
From page 25, the best shot is the blue line with 50kJ of energy. With D-D, this gave about 9e10 neutrons. Multiply by 2 fusions/neutron * 2.7 MeV /fusion * 1.6e-13 J/Mev, we get 0.78 Joule. So Q is 1.6e-6. Give two orders of magnitude improvement for D-T, and it is still Q=0.00016 . For practical power, Q must be at least 10. A long way to go.

Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 11:02 pm
by rnebel
The Plasma Focus has been around for a long time. The usual criticism is that the fusion comes from instabilities (much like happened in Zeta in the 50s) and it won't scale. However, these machines can produce a lot of neutrons and I don't know what the new wrinkle is that is being proposed here.

Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 6:37 pm
by Torulf2
Yes the fusion comes from instabilities and that is the beef.