On Aug 1, 2008, at 12:04 PM, Brian Prothro wrote:
I know he passed away, but any followup information on Robert
Bussard's
technology?(Inertial electrostatic confinement fusion) The final
data they
analyzed after the project lost funding showed they had succeeded
at a final
stage level.
Funded for over 20 years by the Department of the Navy, Bussard's EMC2
corporation was tasked with solving 19 fundamental challenges that
stood in
the way of designing commercially viable Farnsworth fusors - and in an
unexpected twist, a race to bring the prototype online after
project funding
was cut in 2006.
In 2006, Bussard's Polywell design was awarded the Outstanding
Technology of
the Year Award by the International Academy of Science.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU
Brian Prothro
I assume you have seen the following:
On Jun 13, 2008, at 11:51 AM, Horace Heffner wrote:
On Jun 12, 2008, at 11:09 PM, leaking pen wrote:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/06/12/1136887.aspx
Emc2 Fusion's Richard Nebel can't say yet whether his team's
garage-shop plasma experiment will lead to cheap, abundant fusion
power. But he can say that after months of tweaking, the WB-7 device
"runs like a top" - and he's hoping to get definitive answers
about a
technology that has tantalized grass-roots fusion fans for years.
With $1.8 million in backing from the U.S. Navy, Nebel and a handful
of other researchers have been following up on studies conducted by
the late physicist Robert Bussard before his death last October -
studies that Bussard said promised a breakthrough in fusion energy.
Interesting. See also:
http://www.emc2fusion.org/
http://www.emc2fusion.org/RsltsNFnlConclFmIEFPolyPgm120602.pdf
After briefly reviewing the above it seems that two concepts might
be of use:
1. The magnetic coils are said to do an adequate job of
protecting themselves, but electron leakage in the gaps is said to
be the problem. It therefore seems a useful concept to position
layers of coils like the layers of an onion, with the magnet
configuration at the n+1 layer configured to make the most use of
the leakage, i.e. reflect or return the leakage, from the inner
layer n.
2. Loss can be expected at structural support and power or
cooling supply members. For this reason, a magnet geometry
wherein the electromagnet consists of a single long but folded
entity, containing structural members and cooling supplies within
itself, makes sense.
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
