Hello,
Has anyone actually collected energy from fusion? Does anyone know?
Fusors fuse material and give off heat.... has anyone rigged a steam cycle to this?
The direct conversion experiments used a commercial ion source. Did anyone rig this up to a fusor?
The tokamak runs for 0.5 a second, has anyone tried to collect energy from the ions?
Has the Focus fusion crowd attempted to collect power?
Also, can you run a fusor for, say, 5 minutes?
Has anyone ever actually collected energy from fusion?
Re: Has anyone ever actually collected energy from fusion?
Practical electrical power generation from fusion has probably never been attempted. In fusors it is a matter of scale, and of course waste heat of perhaps 1000 Watts completly overwheming the nanowatts or less of fusion power generated. The JET Tokamack made plenty of fusion power, perhaps a little more than 15 MW, but the waste heat from the plasma was greater at ~ 20 MW and the waste heat from the copper electromagnets was 100s of MW. The total heat was probably ignored except that it limited the time the apparatus could run before it overheated. Converting the resultant heat, whether waste heat or fusion heat , was not addressed because this process is already well understood, as it is carried out in any fission, or coal power plant.
Direct conversion of high KE fusion products into electricity is less accepted (?). But there are examples of direct conversion. The Polywell Magrid is a prime example of this as it recovers the KE of most of the escaping electrons and recycles it ( by re-accelerating these electrons back into the Magrid internal volume without additional electrical input cost). Any vacuum tube, TV cathode ray tube, particle accelerator , ion engine, etc, etc. are examples of direct conversion. Whether this can be configured to capture the KE directly of huge quantities of high energy Fusion product ions in an efficient and survivable manner is the question.
A Fusor can indeed be run for many minutes, if not indefinitely, limited by many factors, like the deuterium supply, accumulating X-ray exposure concerns , power failures, heat accumulation, etc.
Other fusion schemes may be limited to pulses of variable length, such as DPF (Focus Fusion), inertial confinement, and Tokamaks. I believe there are both pulsed and steady state (continuous) FRC schemes.
Pulsed or intermittent schemes are not necessarily problematic. For instance a DPF that cycled - pulsed 120 times per second, with some capacitance and switching equipment might feed into the existing 60 Htz power grid conveniently.
Dan Tibbets
Direct conversion of high KE fusion products into electricity is less accepted (?). But there are examples of direct conversion. The Polywell Magrid is a prime example of this as it recovers the KE of most of the escaping electrons and recycles it ( by re-accelerating these electrons back into the Magrid internal volume without additional electrical input cost). Any vacuum tube, TV cathode ray tube, particle accelerator , ion engine, etc, etc. are examples of direct conversion. Whether this can be configured to capture the KE directly of huge quantities of high energy Fusion product ions in an efficient and survivable manner is the question.
A Fusor can indeed be run for many minutes, if not indefinitely, limited by many factors, like the deuterium supply, accumulating X-ray exposure concerns , power failures, heat accumulation, etc.
Other fusion schemes may be limited to pulses of variable length, such as DPF (Focus Fusion), inertial confinement, and Tokamaks. I believe there are both pulsed and steady state (continuous) FRC schemes.
Pulsed or intermittent schemes are not necessarily problematic. For instance a DPF that cycled - pulsed 120 times per second, with some capacitance and switching equipment might feed into the existing 60 Htz power grid conveniently.
Dan Tibbets
To error is human... and I'm very human.
Re: Has anyone ever actually collected energy from fusion?
Andrea Rossi's entire system is based on that:
http://www.e-catworld.com/
http://www.e-catworld.com/
Re: Has anyone ever actually collected energy from fusion?
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.
Re: Has anyone ever actually collected energy from fusion?
Yesmattman wrote:Has anyone actually collected energy from fusion?
Stick the thing in a tub of water! Sheesh!