Talk-Polywell.org

Regarding the magrid power... At what point would the magnetic field be powerful enough to trap the fusion products? That would put an upper limit on the power output of the machine in terms of its size, which is only important for the very speculative rocketry applications of the polywell (which is...

The energy doesn't go away.

So the collisions are perfectly elastic?

Thanks chrismb and TallDave I understand the point that the fusion products leave the machine and don't usually contribute to "heating" the plasma inside the polywell. I think i can accept that ions that are scattered and thermalized by collisions with other ions will be 'rebeamed' back to the their...

It seems that tokamak and ICF are striving for a condition called ignition that means that the energy released after getting the fusion going is enough to sustain it as long as fuel is added and ash is removed. Why is this not needed for polywell devices? Ions will slam into each other a few thousan...

Maybe Nebel is right (I certainly hope he is). Take 3He+3He fusion. The polywell will be containing a potential well of about 100 KeV and the reaction products are no more than 12.9 Mev. The ratio of reaction product energy to containment energy is 129. So a magnetic container 100x as powerful may n...

Hi KitemanSA I've promoted you to Bureaucrat on the faq. I've started to edit more pages. Hopefully someone can improve my simplistic explanations. But its starting to get fleshed out.

There is always D-D to start - until the pB11 difficulties can be worked out. Even deuterium fusion has high energy charge particle products: according to wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Important_reactions 50% of the time D+D fusion results in: 1MeV triton and a 3MeV proton the o...

What do you mean by mostly leaves though the cusps? The magrid casts at least a 10% shadow on the released high energy particles. Sure that means that 90% of the particles don't touch the magrid. But the 10% that do cause all kinds of problems. Or do you mean that the magrid's field is sufficient en...

Coat the grids with B11. That might work for the first second before neutral ions start piling up. For each gram of spent fuel almost 2000 grams will get sputtered into the reaction chamber. Eventually they'll choke out the reaction. Taken to absurdities the near vacuum vessel will be pushing more ...

well as long as the magnet were on the dust would stick to it. Turn the magnet off and then you'd have to get a broom. Anyway its probably impossible to find a material with a paramagnetic quality that could compete with electrostatic forces. How would ITER or JET deal with sputtering from those mul...

Maybe answering newbie questions over and over isn't a problem after all.

Could a paramagnetic material exist that would be more attracted to a strong magnet than a strong electrostatic field? Say platinum foil (or something more paramagnetic) coated the multi tesla magnet. As my wishful thinking goes, the atoms that are dislodged and scattered at high velocity are snappe...

F.A.Q website proposal here:

viewtopic.php?p=18415#18415

Greetings polywell enthusiasts. I have a web server with the bandwidth to handle the hosting of a FAQ page for polywell. And it is economical for me to maintain for a long time. I've got the start of a FAQ going and I am here to propose its use amongst people here much more informed than I. I choose...