5 ms·
How do you take energy off one of these?
by thrownaway2424 11y ago
How do you take energy off one of these?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sbierwagen 11y agoJust by using it as a regular heat source to boil water, then running the steam through turbines, like any other thermal power plant. There are schemes to convert charged particle flux directly into electricity, but I'm not aware of any fusion power experiments that use them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
- thrownaway2424 11y agoThat was a little bit vague. How does the heat actually get out of this thing and into the water? If the plasma is confined in a magnetic field, not in contact with the shell, and the shell is super-cooled to 4K, I'm a little lost on how it would work in practice.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoThe plasma is confined but its glow is not.
- avar 11y agoIf you step outside during the day you can have first-hand experience of a contained fusion reactor that manages to heat things up at a distance. That's how we'll extract energy from fusion reactors, but with approximately 1 AU less distance.
- Frenchgeek 11y ago( unless things go comically wrong )
- elif 11y agoi have absolutely no authority to speculate, but i would guess you'd vent plasma to a heat exchanger by diverting only part of the stream with a controlled EM field, either periodically or continuously. You'd have to do it anyway to remove the helium and inject some fresh tritium and deuterium, right?
- sbierwagen 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divertor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divertor
- the8472 11y ago> and the shell is super-cooled to 4K I think only the shells of the superconducting coils are cooled to those temperatures. The rest of the system, including the containment walls, are water-cooled. In a real system you would also have neutron radiation carrying away energy that could be captured with additional layers of water.
- jasonwatkinspdx 11y agohttp://www.helionenergy.com http://www.helionenergy.com plans to do direct conversion. It's a follow on to previous university work, dunno if they tested/measured that part.
- NikolaeVarius 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Heating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Heating The one I heard of was the neutron blanket method
- thrownaway2424 11y agoIsn't that how they heat the core to initiate fusion? That's the opposite of what I'm asking. There's absolutely no question nor doubt that every fusion research reactor in history has been capable of sinking a tremendous amount of power :) Edit: ah, I imagine you meant to direct me to the later "Power production" paragraph.
- WorkLobster 11y agoThe current front-runner seems to be a blanket of water surrounding the reactor vessel, which is heated by the stray neutrons from the fusion reaction. It has the double-win that if Lithium is added, the high energy neutrons end up breeding more Tritium fuel.