WB-100 designs are being evaluated?

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MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

Bringing it back to that first off topic; MSimon, how would you structure the design-build-operate team to bring it in at the lowst cost, and how low do you think that cost coould possibly go?
When you don't know what you are doing it is impossible to design a minimum cost approach.

We did get a big help when some one recently found a very low cost power supply vendor. About 25 cents a watt for HV megawatts. I was estimating $1 a watt for a very long time.

1. We need a continuous operation machine. SC or LN2 depending
2. A doubled size pulsed machine - for scaling

Once we have data from them we can think about WB-100.

For WB-100 I'd go with the approach suggested by Brooks. Six or eight master surgeons (depending on project breakdown) supported by teams expert in the surgeon's field.

I would not break it down along the lines of a drafting dept. A machining dept. etc except for general support functions like accounting. And maybe not even then. Maybe we contract out payroll. Each team is autonomous. No vying for people and tools. I don't want scheduling conflicts to get in the way of getting something done. If there is enough work to keep 1/2 person busy we hire a whole one. If they have spare time that goes into cross training.

If we have a lot of 10% tasks from different groups that might be handled by one person. We make sure the loading on that one is not above 70% or so. That gives surge capacity.

The cheapest way to get things done is to design a fair amount of "waste" into the system. Bottlenecks are what drive costs the most. Six teams waiting for the seventh to finish an activity.

PERT chart it to death before you start. Timely revisions as knowledge is gained. Again: spare resources to throw at bottlenecks.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

Billy Catringer
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Post by Billy Catringer »

I can help with the pert charts ad nauseum. I don't like scheduling, but I have done a lot of it.

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

pfrit wrote: ...So what is the driving expense? The facilities would be very expensive if you had to buy and build it yourself. How many magnets are you going to burn through to get a working system? These aren't little hand wound magnets here.
It seems that DrB actually DID want to stay at the Little hand wound magnet phase for two more machines, the ORIGINAL WB-7 and WB-8. The original WB-7 was supposed to have "square" plan form magnets (the cuboctohedron), while WB-8 was to be the dodecahedron.

Personally, I would like to do BOTH of them too. Without them, we m ight make a poor design decision.

However, rather than the straight sided cuboctohedron, I would perfer the sphere following bow-sided variation that tombo just drew up. His drawing was the MPG type configuration rather than the primary/virtual magnet configuration, but either way is fine.

Robthebob
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Post by Robthebob »

whoa guys, what's with the hate on DOE, they aren't that great, but they fund research for my friend's dad's research and my professor's research, as well as many other, so they're okay in my book.
Throwing my life away for this whole Fusion mess.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

Robthebob wrote:whoa guys, what's with the hate on DOE, they aren't that great, but they fund research for my friend's dad's research and my professor's research, as well as many other, so they're okay in my book.
Norrowmindedness. Not a good thing for a scientific organization.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

kttopdad
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Post by kttopdad »

MSimon wrote:
Robthebob wrote:whoa guys, what's with the hate on DOE, they aren't that great, but they fund research for my friend's dad's research and my professor's research, as well as many other, so they're okay in my book.
Norrowmindedness. Not a good thing for a scientific organization.
Narrow-mindedness. The norm in a bureaucratic organization.

I guess this just goes to show that the DOE is, at its heart, a bureaucratic arm of the government doing science, not a scientific arm of the government.

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

Dr. Poole is right, "government science" is an ox and a moron.

tombo
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Post by tombo »

pfrit wrote: My personal political pet peeve is political parties. One always hears that our government is based on a two-party system. It isn't as we are not a parlementarian system, we have a constitutional republic. Our government is based on a no party system. Our founding fathers hated the idea of parties.
I recall reading in the "Federalist Papers" That (to paraphrase): the only thing that will destroy this constitution would be a 2 party system.
The electoral college is designed to make a good selection out of a large group of disparate interests with no clear majority. I would love to see the electoral college actually operate as intended some time, instead of being a rubber stamp for the 2 parties that work very hard to keep each other in power.
-Tom Boydston-
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?" ~Albert Einstein

IntLibber
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Post by IntLibber »

tombo wrote:
pfrit wrote: My personal political pet peeve is political parties. One always hears that our government is based on a two-party system. It isn't as we are not a parlementarian system, we have a constitutional republic. Our government is based on a no party system. Our founding fathers hated the idea of parties.
I recall reading in the "Federalist Papers" That (to paraphrase): the only thing that will destroy this constitution would be a 2 party system.
The electoral college is designed to make a good selection out of a large group of disparate interests with no clear majority. I would love to see the electoral college actually operate as intended some time, instead of being a rubber stamp for the 2 parties that work very hard to keep each other in power.
Actually, the founders hated other parties because the founders were all Whigs. The Tory Party, which was the party in Britain that was against American Independence, was the enemy.

So the hate of political parties was actually a preference for the one party, the Whigs (not the later American Whig Party of the 1830's that preceeded the founding of the GOP). This sort of one party preference is NOT a good thing, but typical of most revolutions. Lenin made the USSR a one party system on the logic that since the Communist Party represented all the people that any other party was essentially anti-revolutionary and against the people. Look how great that turned out.

Like most revolutions, the post revolutionary politics turned on whether the rural peasantry or the city merchants should see their preferred policies implemented. Hence, the arguments over taxation, banking, and trade and tariffs. Those differences in interests were inevitable in causing multiple parties to arise. The Whigs split into the Republican Democrats and the Federalists. All of them were primarily masons, which caused a few abuses that led to the rise of the Anti-Mason Party aka the Know-Nothing Party. After that you got the Free Soiler Party, and as the slavery question heated up, the Abolitionists.

The Free Soilers, Abolitionists, and the remnants of the Anti-Masons were joined together by Amos Tuck to form the American Whig Party, which lasted two elections, then he reformed them into the Republican Party. The old Republican Democrat Party became the Democratic Party.

Roger
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Post by Roger »

The time is coming closer to when I see these 2 very important projects moving forward.
MSimon wrote:
1. We need a continuous operation machine. SC or LN2 depending
2. A doubled size pulsed machine - for scaling

Once we have data from them we can think about WB-100.
Heres to hoping that after WB-7.1, both a double size and LN2 cooled get built. Continuous operation on the order of 100's of seconds needs to be done. I think the best format is something like WB-7x.

Wb-100 would prove scaling but should or can, we prove scaling cheaper? Double the size of WB-7.1 then power it the same as WB-7.1, we should get some kind of answer.
I like the p-B11 resonance peak at 50 KV acceleration. In2 years we'll know.

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