1st post: nano/mems polywell?
Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2009 1:35 pm
While i am eager for Polywell to scale up and reach / surpass the energy break-even point, so does the cost increase for hardware materials.
Someone on this board mentioned that for polywell to become succesfull we should not only look at getting a bigger power output, but also lower the power input/ material costs
How about considering an extremely scaled down version in the nanoscale regime, using Mems and/or Lithography fabrication methods from the chip industrie?
Let's for a moment entertain that it is even possible,
The energy output of a single nano/micro sized polywell would be far from impressive, but perhaps mass fabricated wafers of them would make up for that in terms of material and production costs.
Once you covered the initial research costs, you could churn them out by the millions, lowering the cost of a single unit, lets also consider the supportive hardware costs for larger polywell, like huge expensive vacume chambers, magnets, cooling requirements etc.
Oppertunities in the nanoscale regime:
- Do away with large vacume chambers, the wafer, consisting of multiple polywells is covered by a plate and has a small micromachined pump.
- on die polywells are controlled by chips baked on the same wafer.
= you could plug multiple wafer units into a rack powerserver to meet increased energy demands.
- very small confinement space, thus:
* small magnets, low field requirements, magnetism effect dimishes with distance, so bigger polywells must have increasingly bigger/or more powerfull magnets to cover the distance to the center, it doesn't scale linear, precisely why magnets in close proximity can take advantage of their near-field strength.
* small magnets, low field = low power input, low cooling requirements, possibly even passive cooling and/or on chip peltier cooling stuff.
- mems/nano sized polywells could be at least a starting research point for universities that cannot cough up the initial costs for a large vacume chamber etc, this would widen the collective effort in the whole polywell research area.
- More affordable Prototyping and testing in mems/nano, validation of concept before building full scale macro sized powerplant etc.
- very small confinement space, perhaps a relatively denser/larger crossection for ions to hit and very short return paths for electron escaping from the cusps, shortened electron return time possibly increasing electron density in the center.
These are just wild guesses, I would need the opinion of someone with more technological background for this...
What do you think?
Someone on this board mentioned that for polywell to become succesfull we should not only look at getting a bigger power output, but also lower the power input/ material costs
How about considering an extremely scaled down version in the nanoscale regime, using Mems and/or Lithography fabrication methods from the chip industrie?
Let's for a moment entertain that it is even possible,
The energy output of a single nano/micro sized polywell would be far from impressive, but perhaps mass fabricated wafers of them would make up for that in terms of material and production costs.
Once you covered the initial research costs, you could churn them out by the millions, lowering the cost of a single unit, lets also consider the supportive hardware costs for larger polywell, like huge expensive vacume chambers, magnets, cooling requirements etc.
Oppertunities in the nanoscale regime:
- Do away with large vacume chambers, the wafer, consisting of multiple polywells is covered by a plate and has a small micromachined pump.
- on die polywells are controlled by chips baked on the same wafer.
= you could plug multiple wafer units into a rack powerserver to meet increased energy demands.
- very small confinement space, thus:
* small magnets, low field requirements, magnetism effect dimishes with distance, so bigger polywells must have increasingly bigger/or more powerfull magnets to cover the distance to the center, it doesn't scale linear, precisely why magnets in close proximity can take advantage of their near-field strength.
* small magnets, low field = low power input, low cooling requirements, possibly even passive cooling and/or on chip peltier cooling stuff.
- mems/nano sized polywells could be at least a starting research point for universities that cannot cough up the initial costs for a large vacume chamber etc, this would widen the collective effort in the whole polywell research area.
- More affordable Prototyping and testing in mems/nano, validation of concept before building full scale macro sized powerplant etc.
- very small confinement space, perhaps a relatively denser/larger crossection for ions to hit and very short return paths for electron escaping from the cusps, shortened electron return time possibly increasing electron density in the center.
These are just wild guesses, I would need the opinion of someone with more technological background for this...
What do you think?