This has been discussed here and elsewhere so many times I'm not even going to bother. Let me just say that for this type of device permanent magnets are useless.
Clue: at the magnet poles the permanent magnet (PM) fields are not conformal to the matter enclosed by the fields. Electromagnets are conformal.
OK you covered this. Excellent. Now how do you know that PM losses don't interfere with operation of a device which depends for its proper function losses well below 1%?
Bussard did do PM experiments in the early days. He gave up that route. I assume he had a good reason.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
But that's for a 'full-speed' fuel proton (I guess) which'd be 10Mm/s, so that's an *average* flight time of 40ms to fusion.
I guess the speed of light is really ~300,000 Km/sec, so my numbers were off by a factor of 1000. Using my numbers then, and the right value of the speed of light, there's plenty of time for an injected ion to achieve steady state, if the machine is already running.
I'm not sure how to address the problem of start up time delays. The first question I have is, "What was the state of WB-6 at time = 0, to reach steady state in 20 ms?"
"The stuff we do operates at hundredths of a second," Nebel said. "The cameras were critical."
Speaking of which..
"Our serial time-encoded amplified microscopy (STEAM) technology enables continuous real-time imaging at a frame rate of more than 6 MHz, a shutter speed of less than 450 ps and an optical image gain of more than 300
[...]
"Unlike other high-speed imaging methods, our approach does not require cooling of the camera or high-intensity illumination — problems that plague conventional CCD and CMOS cameras,"
"The stuff we do operates at hundredths of a second," Nebel said. "The cameras were critical."
Speaking of which..
"Our serial time-encoded amplified microscopy (STEAM) technology enables continuous real-time imaging at a frame rate of more than 6 MHz, a shutter speed of less than 450 ps and an optical image gain of more than 300
[...]
"Unlike other high-speed imaging methods, our approach does not require cooling of the camera or high-intensity illumination — problems that plague conventional CCD and CMOS cameras,"
Hundredths of a second means that it is rather likely that he has a bigger capacitor bank.
Isn't that like tens of milliseconds? And it runs like a top!
Tens of milliseconds is getting close to steady state, isn't it? Does that mean that perhaps the fuel gas puffer has been replaced by something better?
As for a larger capacitor bank, well, maybe some interested party has loaned them some equipment. It is not unreasonable, considering that if this thing works, or even if it gets more development funding, there will be some significant electrics required. Maybe some organization is motivated to have the inside track on the knowledge to bid on that contract. Its not unheard of.
It's also conceivable that that they might have borrowed an unused or outdated piece of the Z-Machine power supply. The cap banks on that thing are massive and I know it went through a couple of different configurations before it reached the state it's in now. I'm sure there are probably some old cap bank sections sitting around unused somewhere.
(Or maybe not. I was thinking the Z-Machine was at Los Alamos, but it's at Sandia.)
IIRC, even the WB6 was run steady state at low power to study wiffleball formation and the like. Its just that fusion only happened in the high power, high heating regime.
Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.
Government laboratories often bid for contract work, especially government work.
It's a small world, I'm sure that Dr. Nebel has contacts at Sandia. If they have unused equipment he would like to borrow, he might just ask them for a "No Strings" loan of the equipment. Of course, I don't know the protocols.