3 ms·
Huge electromagnets. Perfectly tuned. With the power budget of a small town.
by lolc 6y ago
Huge electromagnets. Perfectly tuned. With the power budget of a small town.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- willis936 6y agoKSTAR uses superconducting confinement coils. It takes virtually no power for the confining field. I work on a research machine that uses copper coils. It uses 16x 1000 HP train traction motors with 2000 lb flywheels for energy storage to power the confinement field for one second. :)
- fy20 6y ago16x 1000HP is 12MW, so yes a small town of ~10,000 people. For a few seconds at least :-)
- willis936 6y agoMy point is that superconducting confinement coils don't take any power to maintain their field. You just spin them up and leave them there. The power to keep cryogenics running is a hundred-fold less than the electrical power needed for confinement coils. JET and DIII-D are the largest magnetic confinement fusion research devices made so far and they both use copper coils. They have confining fields of 3.45 T and 2.2 T, respectively. My machine operates at a modest 1 T (for now) and is much smaller. I'm sure the electricity bill that the confining coils that those large machines racked up is substantial.
- dredds 6y agoForgive my ignorance, but aren't cryogenics and plasma temps at complete odds to function in near proximity?
- sobani 6y agoYou're not supposed to let them touch. You won't go to space^W^W^W have fusion today if the magnetically confined plasma somehow escapes its confinement and touches the walls of the plasma chamber, let alone the cryogenics of the magnets. Besides creating the pressure, that purpose of the magnets is to keep the _few grams_ of plasma away from the walls of the otherwise vacuum chamber. Look up magnetic levitation, where you keep an object up using just a magnet. Now imagine huge magnets that push against an object from all sides, creating a ton of pressure. (Don't forget to include a whole bunch of fancy math to prevent the object from slipping away like a wet bar of soap you squeeze with your hands.) At no point should the object touch any of the magnets. Also keep in mind that when you (don't) want to heat something else up it's not the temperature that matters, but the total energy of the object. And the total energy is basically mass x temperature difference. So 1 gram at a million degrees is equivalent to 1 Kg at a thousand degrees, which is a lot less scary.
- lolc 6y agoThanks for the correction! I did wonder whether it is wise to comment when I don't know anything about that model.