4 ms·

With the new magnet engineering (basically the electromagnets are using some kind of metamaterial for the wiring that's needed to wrap around the toroid that's

With the new magnet engineering (basically the electromagnets are using some kind of metamaterial for the wiring that's needed to wrap around the toroid that's way better than copper, thus confinement is much easier with the stronger B field in way smaller space [the first research paper that talks about this being theoretically possible was back in 1987, but the engineering capabilities were not there to do such]), you are not limited by volume compared to strength of the B field, so you could have portable decentralized fusion reactors (they talk about this in the video).

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
He did say there are other practical limits to how small it can be though. You have to stuff other stuff inside the coils and the plasma has to be physically separated from the walls of the chamber by some distance since it is so hot it would melt the walls, and it just gets hard to squeeze everything in there. But I wonder for example if SPARC could be made in to a system that could operate continuously, even though ARC makes more sense from a power generation perspective.
- cinquemb 5y ago
  > physically separated from the walls of the chamber by some distance since it is so hot it would melt the walls This distance could probably be shrunk if some of the gains from matsi for meta-materials translated into fluids engineering, where some kind of "meta" fluid has certain differential properties at a given thermal load (im imagining that the side/region with the thermal load, the particles in the fluid would have some type of glassy dynamics behavior to spontaneously create a radiant barrier back toward the source, would need to talk more with my friend about this since his thesis covered quasi-1d models of glassy dynamics and spontaneous partial arrangements under various conditions on initial perturbation and at steady state).

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

He did say there are other practical limits to how small it can be though. You have to stuff other stuff inside the coils and the plasma has to be physically separated from the walls of the chamber by some distance since it is so hot it would melt the walls, and it just gets hard to squeeze everything in there. But I wonder for example if SPARC could be made in to a system that could operate continuously, even though ARC makes more sense from a power generation perspective.

cinquemb 5y ago
> physically separated from the walls of the chamber by some distance since it is so hot it would melt the walls This distance could probably be shrunk if some of the gains from matsi for meta-materials translated into fluids engineering, where some kind of "meta" fluid has certain differential properties at a given thermal load (im imagining that the side/region with the thermal load, the particles in the fluid would have some type of glassy dynamics behavior to spontaneously create a radiant barrier back toward the source, would need to talk more with my friend about this since his thesis covered quasi-1d models of glassy dynamics and spontaneous partial arrangements under various conditions on initial perturbation and at steady state).