Polywell
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Polywell
The polywell is a proposed design for a fusion reactor using an electric field to heat ions to fusion conditions. The design is related to the fusor, the high beta fusion reactor, the magnetic mirror, and the biconic cusp. A set of electromagnets generates a magnetic field that traps electrons. This creates a negative voltage, which attracts positive ions. As the ions accelerate towards the negative center, their kinetic energy rises. Ions that collide at high enough energies can fuse. Mechanism Fusor A Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor consists of two wire cages, one inside the other, often referred to as grids, that are placed inside a vacuum chamber. The outer cage has a positive voltage versus the inner cage. A fuel, typically, deuterium gas, is injected into this chamber. It is heated past its ionization temperature, making positive ions. The ions are positive and move towards the negative inner cage. Those that miss the wires of the inner cage fly through the center of ...
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Polywell With Externally Mounted Rings
The polywell is a proposed design for a fusion reactor using an electric field to heat ions to fusion conditions. The design is related to the fusor, the high beta fusion reactor, the magnetic mirror, and the biconic cusp. A set of electromagnets generates a magnetic field that traps electrons. This creates a negative voltage, which attracts positive ions. As the ions accelerate towards the negative center, their kinetic energy rises. Ions that collide at high enough energies can nuclear fusion, fuse. Mechanism Fusor A Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor consists of two wire cages, one inside the other, often referred to as grids, that are placed inside a vacuum chamber. The outer cage has a positive voltage versus the inner cage. A fuel, typically, deuterium gas, is injected into this chamber. It is heated past its Ionization energy, ionization temperature, making positive ions. The ions are positive and move towards the negative inner cage. Those that miss the wires of the inner c ...
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Fusion Reactor
Fusion power is a proposed form of power generation that would generate electricity by using heat from nuclear fusion reactions. In a fusion process, two lighter atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier nucleus, while releasing energy. Devices designed to harness this energy are known as fusion reactors. Research into fusion reactors began in the 1940s, but as of 2022, only one design, an inertial confinement laser-driven fusion machine at the US National Ignition Facility, has conclusively produced a positive fusion energy gain factor, i.e. more power output than input. Fusion processes require fuel and a confined environment with sufficient temperature, pressure, and confinement time to create a plasma in which fusion can occur. The combination of these figures that results in a power-producing system is known as the Lawson criterion. In stars, the most common fuel is hydrogen, and gravity provides extremely long confinement times that reach the conditions needed for fusion energ ...
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Fusor Running
A fusor is a device that uses an electric field to heat ions to nuclear fusion conditions. The machine induces a voltage between two metal cages, inside a vacuum. Positive ions fall down this voltage drop, building up speed. If they collide in the center, they can fuse. This is one kind of an inertial electrostatic confinement device – a branch of fusion research. A Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor is the most common type of fusor. This design came from work by Philo T. Farnsworth in 1964 and Robert L. Hirsch in 1967.Robert L. Hirsch, "Inertial-Electrostatic Confinement of Ionized Fusion Gases", Journal of Applied Physics, v. 38, no. 7, October 1967 A variant type of fusor had been proposed previously by William Elmore, James L. Tuck, and Ken Watson at the Los Alamos National Laboratory"On the Inertial Electrostatic Confinement of a Plasma" William Elmore, James Tuck and Ken Watson, The Physics of Fluids, January 30, 1959 though they never built the machine. Fusors have been built ...
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Fusor Mechanism
A fusor is a device that uses an electric field to heat ions to nuclear fusion conditions. The machine induces a voltage between two metal cages, inside a vacuum. Positive ions fall down this voltage drop, building up speed. If they collide in the center, they can fuse. This is one kind of an inertial electrostatic confinement device – a branch of fusion research. A Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor is the most common type of fusor. This design came from work by Philo T. Farnsworth in 1964 and Robert L. Hirsch in 1967.Robert L. Hirsch, "Inertial-Electrostatic Confinement of Ionized Fusion Gases", Journal of Applied Physics, v. 38, no. 7, October 1967 A variant type of fusor had been proposed previously by William Elmore, James L. Tuck, and Ken Watson at the Los Alamos National Laboratory"On the Inertial Electrostatic Confinement of a Plasma" William Elmore, James Tuck and Ken Watson, The Physics of Fluids, January 30, 1959 though they never built the machine. Fusors have been bui ...
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Robert Bussard
Robert W. Bussard (August 11, 1928 – October 6, 2007) was an American physicist who worked primarily in nuclear fusion energy research. He was the recipient of the Schreiber-Spence Achievement Award for STAIF-2004. He was also a fellow of the International Academy of Astronautics and held a Ph.D. from Princeton University. Kiwi (Rover-A) In June 1955 Bussard moved to Los Alamos and joined the Nuclear Propulsion Division's Project Rover designing nuclear thermal rocket engines.Bussard, Robert. "Nuclear Rocketry - The First Bright Hopes", Astronautics, Vol. 7, No. 12, Dec. 1962, pp. 32–35 Bussard and R.D. DeLauer wrote two important monographs on nuclear propulsion, ''Nuclear Rocket Propulsion'' and ''Fundamentals of Nuclear Flight''. Bussard ramjet In 1960, Bussard conceived of the Bussard ramjet, an interstellar space drive powered by hydrogen fusion using hydrogen collected with a magnetic field from the interstellar gas. Due to the presence of high-energy particles ...
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Fusor
A fusor is a device that uses an electric field to heat ions to nuclear fusion conditions. The machine induces a voltage between two metal cages, inside a vacuum. Positive ions fall down this voltage drop, building up speed. If they collide in the center, they can fuse. This is one kind of an inertial electrostatic confinement device – a branch of fusion research. A Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor is the most common type of fusor. This design came from work by Philo T. Farnsworth in 1964 and Robert L. Hirsch in 1967.Robert L. Hirsch, "Inertial-Electrostatic Confinement of Ionized Fusion Gases", Journal of Applied Physics, v. 38, no. 7, October 1967 A variant type of fusor had been proposed previously by William Elmore, James L. Tuck, and Ken Watson at the Los Alamos National Laboratory"On the Inertial Electrostatic Confinement of a Plasma" William Elmore, James Tuck and Ken Watson, The Physics of Fluids, January 30, 1959 though they never built the machine. Fusors have been buil ...
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Biconic Cusp
The biconic cusp was one of the earliest suggestions for plasma confinement in a fusion reactor. It consists of two parallel electromagnets with the current running in opposite directions, creating oppositely directed magnetic fields. The two fields interact to form a "null area" between them where the fusion fuel can be trapped. Most early work on the cusp design was carried out at the Courant Institute in New York by Harold Grad in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Variations on the basic concept include the picket fence reactor built at Los Alamos in the 1950s and ring reactors. All of these devices leaked their fuel plasma at rates much greater than predicted and most work on the concept ended by the mid-1960s. Mikhail Ioffe later demonstrated why these problems arose. A later device that shares some design with the cusp is the polywell concept of the 1990s. This can be thought of as multiple cusps arranged in three dimensions. Description The magnetic fields in this syst ...
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Magnet
A magnet is a material or object that produces a magnetic field. This magnetic field is invisible but is responsible for the most notable property of a magnet: a force that pulls on other ferromagnetic materials, such as iron, steel, nickel, cobalt, etc. and attracts or repels other magnets. A permanent magnet is an object made from a material that is magnetized and creates its own persistent magnetic field. An everyday example is a refrigerator magnet used to hold notes on a refrigerator door. Materials that can be magnetized, which are also the ones that are strongly attracted to a magnet, are called ferromagnetic (or ferrimagnetic). These include the elements iron, nickel and cobalt and their alloys, some alloys of rare-earth metals, and some naturally occurring minerals such as lodestone. Although ferromagnetic (and ferrimagnetic) materials are the only ones attracted to a magnet strongly enough to be commonly considered magnetic, all other substances respond weakly to ...
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Cube
In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. Viewed from a corner it is a hexagon and its net is usually depicted as a cross. The cube is the only regular hexahedron and is one of the five Platonic solids. It has 6 faces, 12 edges, and 8 vertices. The cube is also a square parallelepiped, an equilateral cuboid and a right rhombohedron a 3-zonohedron. It is a regular square prism in three orientations, and a trigonal trapezohedron in four orientations. The cube is dual to the octahedron. It has cubical or octahedral symmetry. The cube is the only convex polyhedron whose faces are all squares. Orthogonal projections The ''cube'' has four special orthogonal projections, centered, on a vertex, edges, face and normal to its vertex figure. The first and third correspond to the A2 and B2 Coxeter planes. Spherical tiling The cube can also be represented as a spherical tiling, and ...
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Potential Well
A potential well is the region surrounding a local minimum of potential energy. Energy captured in a potential well is unable to convert to another type of energy (kinetic energy in the case of a gravitational potential well) because it is captured in the local minimum of a potential well. Therefore, a body may not proceed to the global minimum of potential energy, as it would naturally tend to do due to entropy. Overview Energy may be released from a potential well if sufficient energy is added to the system such that the local maximum is surmounted. In quantum physics, potential energy may escape a potential well without added energy due to the probabilistic characteristics of quantum particles; in these cases a particle may be imagined to tunnel ''through'' the walls of a potential well. The graph of a 2D potential energy function is a potential energy surface that can be imagined as the Earth's surface in a landscape of hills and valleys. Then a potential well would be a val ...
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Electromagnet
An electromagnet is a type of magnet in which the magnetic field is produced by an electric current. Electromagnets usually consist of wire wound into a coil. A current through the wire creates a magnetic field which is concentrated in the hole in the center of the coil. The magnetic field disappears when the current is turned off. The wire turns are often wound around a magnetic core made from a ferromagnetic or ferrimagnetic material such as iron; the magnetic core concentrates the magnetic flux and makes a more powerful magnet. The main advantage of an electromagnet over a permanent magnet is that the magnetic field can be quickly changed by controlling the amount of electric current in the winding. However, unlike a permanent magnet that needs no power, an electromagnet requires a continuous supply of current to maintain the magnetic field. Electromagnets are widely used as components of other electrical devices, such as motors, generators, electromechanical solen ...
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Oleg Lavrentiev
Oleg Alexandrovich Lavrentiev (russian: Оле́г Алекса́ндрович Лавре́нтьев; Pskov, Russia – in Kharkiv in Ukraine) was a Ukrainian physicist in the former Soviet atomic bomb project, Soviet program of nuclear weapons whose research contributions were fundamental to understanding of thermonuclear fusion. Biography Lavrentiev was born in Pskov, into a family descended from peasants. His father, Alexander, completed 2 years at a parochial school, worked as a clerk at a Pskov factory, his mother, Alexandra, completed 4 years, and worked as a nurse. During the war, at age 18 he volunteered for the front. He participated in the Baltic Offensive, battles for the Baltic States (1944–1945), transferred to the Far Eastern Military District, Sakhalin Military District, and continued military service in Poronaisk. He was a self-taught physicist who once allowed to attend the Moscow State University but did not secure graduation from there. Eventually, the Kh ...
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