3 ms·
Would love to be pointed towards any kind of mathematical analysis of this at all. There's a really big problem -- you need high ion temperatures to achieve fus
by DaniFong 13y ago
Would love to be pointed towards any kind of mathematical analysis of this at all. There's a really big problem -- you need high ion temperatures to achieve fusion, but it's electron pressure that's transfered by a shockwave, and therefore it should be electron temperature that will increase. It takes on the order of seconds for electrons to transfer their heat -- of a temperature of hundreds of millions of degrees kelvin to ions.
Can a spherically compressed high pressure concentration really maintain itself for the time required to heat the ions?
A good treatment of this is in the 1978 Nobel Prize Lecture of Soviet physicist Pyotr Kapitsa
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1978/kapitsa-lecture.pdf http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/197...
- ihnorton 13y agoThe idea is to run just below the Bohm limit (see eg pg 13 in [1]), where the temperature and density required is much lower than that for Tokamak-style inertial confinement fusion. They adiabatically pre-heat and then inject a field-reversed configuration plasma immediately before implosion. So the plasma is at thermal equilibrium and the magnetic confinement minimizes conductivity loss during implosion. Los Alamos has an MTF program that has demonstrated fusion under these conditions, and there are several other programs. See [2] and [3] for recent experimental and simulation results (different driver mechanism, but same ignition region). [1] http://fire.pppl.gov/fpa04_wurden.pdf http://fire.pppl.gov/fpa04_wurden.pdf [2] http://fire.pppl.gov/IFE_NAS3_MTF_Wurden.pdf http://fire.pppl.gov/IFE_NAS3_MTF_Wurden.pdf [3] http://sites.apam.columbia.edu/SMproceedings/11.ContributedPapers/11.Thio_etal.pdf http://sites.apam.columbia.edu/SMproceedings/11.ContributedP...