Boron buckyballs!

[scareduck]

There's been some talk about how to deal with first-wall issues, especially in a D-D burning Polywell. One suggestion was to use B-10, but a possible downside of that is atomic boron is structurally weak. Here's another possibility I just came across: boron buckyballs.

Yakobson said it is too early to speculate whether the boron buckyball will prove to be equally or more useful than its Nobel Prize-winning sibling.

"It’s too early to make comparisons," he said. "All we know is that it’s a very logical, very stable structure likely to exist.

"But this opens up a whole new direction, a whole new continent to explore. There should be a strong effort to find it experimentally. That may not be an easy path, but we gave them a good road map."

Following the paper's acceptance, there was a little debate with the journal's editors about whether or not the structure could be named "buckyball." Yakobson mentioned this to Curl.

"Bob (Curl) said with a chuckle that it was more of a ‘buckyball’ than his buckyball," Yakobson said. The reason being that C60 was named for famed architect Buckminster Fuller, because the buckyball looked like conjoined geodesic domes, a structure that Fuller had invented.

"When Fuller made his domes, he made them from triangles because hexagons would collapse," Yakobson said. "In B80, we fill the hexagon with one more atom, making triangles."

Researchers at Rice University, the former home of Nobel laureate Richard Smalley, have posited the existence of B80 but have yet to actually build one.

[Roger]

Dont forget those golf clubs

carbon fiber and carbon fiber-boron fiber composites have been formed into webs and used for producing high quality golf club shafts

fts


http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&clie ... tnG=Search

[MSimon]

Interesting.

I was reading today about Boron (for some other purpose) and came up with the fact that it naturally forms icosahedral forms such as B10H14 where 2 vertices have no B and there are extra Hydrogens circulating to neutralize the whole structure.

http://mysite.du.edu/~jcalvert/phys/boron.htm

What I was looking to calculate was the thickness of B10 isotope required to reduce thermal neutron flux by 1/10th. It is .005 inches. Five thousandths. A little over 1/10th mm. Depending on the thickness of the 600K H2O coolant layer a saturated solution of B10 "borax" in the 300K coolant channel might do the trick.

[MSimon]

Now what is even more interesting is that B10 superconductors have a 2 deg K higher Tc than natural B.

The difficulty is that such a superconductor would be 5X as susceptible to neutron damage.

However if a .005" layer can reduce the neutron flux by 10X a .25 inch layer made of castings inserted in our curved magnet tubes (slotted and angled to prevent leakage channels) could reduce the flux to zero (effectively) if the neutron flux is sufficiently thermalized.

That will be the key.

[Brent]

Here is aPatentonline that talks about various methods of Boron deposition, for people like me who need it:

the word Patent is linked to------->http://www.freshpatents.com/
Method-for-depositing-boron-rich-coatings-dt20050922ptan20050208218.php?type=description