Voltage vs Temperature

[Brendan Bogan]

Steven,

I believe its in your paper (otherwise..on one of your other posts) where you state that electric potential can be linked to an atom's velocity. As I understand it, temperature is also an atoms velocity.

As it pertains to your fusion device, you Ionize Deuterium at a voltage below "ground' in the hopes of getting very slow ions so that they will fuse. If you had ions in an ion trap, and made them cold, wouldn't that also slow them down?

Or am I missing something?

Cheers,
Brendan

[Steven Sesselmann]

I believe its in your paper (otherwise..on one of your other posts) where you state that electric potential can be linked to an atom's velocity. As I understand it, temperature is also an atoms velocity.

Brendan, you are quite right, the conclusion I have come to is that the relative velocity between two bodies is proportional to their relative surface potentials, and I am completely stumped as to why I am having such a hard time convincing others of this. My simplistic view that the displacement function can be modelled as a sine wave in the potential-time plane, this being the case, velocity is simply the cosine or derivative. The relation is really quite trivial;

\[\Delta v = c * (\frac{\Delta V}{\Phi})\]

Where ∆v is relative velocity and ∆V is relative potential.

As it pertains to your fusion device, you Ionize Deuterium at a voltage below "ground' in the hopes of getting very slow ions so that they will fuse. If you had ions in an ion trap, and made them cold, wouldn't that also slow them down? Or am I missing something?

Your conclusion is essentially correct, but the act of cooling down a deuterium ion is no trivial matter. Atomic nuclei can be considered as super bouncy balls, so I'm not sure how you would go about maintaining a plasma and at the same time cool the ions down.

Far simpler in my opinion (although yet unsuccessful) is to ionise the deuterium atom at grid potential, somehow let the deuterium atom settle down at grid potential before removing the electron. I link to an excel spreadsheet which calculates the ionisation voltage required to make any atom stand still.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/anjk309npsfts ... .xlsx?dl=0

To retrieve the data for any atom, just enter it in the form 1-H, 2-H, 3-H etc.. where the number indicates the atomic mass number.

So that's the theory, but doing this practically has it's challenges, My various approaches have had mixed success, but I still have other ideas yet to be tested when time and money permits. I am also very happy for others to try my approach, so best of luck...

Steven

[Brendan Bogan]

Seems like in your experiments, the biggest difficulty has been either running equipment at -55kv, or separating the electronics from the -55kv plasma.

How is your latest vacuum chamber configuration coming along? Seems like the last update on it was quite awhile ago.



Have you ever heard of doppler cooling?
Essentially, they use lasers the supercool ions in an ion trap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_cooling

My thought would be that it would be pretty easy for an amateur to come up with a penning trap and a rotating magnetic wall to keep the plasma stable since there are no electrons in the way. I've not done the math on what wavelength of light you'd need for Deuterium, so maybe its not feasible, but if it's a reasonable power wavelength then you could doppler cool the ions in the trap to get them to fuse.

Just a random thought, that may be easier than super high (er..low?) voltages. What do you think?

[Brendan Bogan]

With this new approach to how to fuse Deuterium (which must work to some extent since you did have neutron production in your last test, right?), do you have a formula for the maximum velocity difference that still allows the ions to fuse?

[Steven Sesselmann]

Seems like in your experiments, the biggest difficulty has been either running equipment at -55kv, or separating the electronics from the -55kv plasma.

Yes

How is your latest vacuum chamber configuration coming along?

Having some leak issues, but the latest configuration isn't really trying to ionise the deuterium at the cathode. It's just working as a grid less fusor in this form.

Have you ever heard of doppler cooling?

Yes, but it's way beyond what I can do in my lab.

My thought would be that it would be pretty easy for an amateur to come up with a penning trap and a rotating magnetic wall to keep the plasma stable since there are no electrons in the way. I've not done the math on what wavelength of light you'd need for Deuterium, so maybe its not feasible, but if it's a reasonable power wavelength then you could doppler cool the ions in the trap to get them to fuse.

Worth a try, but I think there may be simpler ways. How about using one of Andrew Seltzman's ion sources and floating it at -62kV ? This would require a special isolation transformer, but otherwise not difficult.
This configuration would look more like a one ended accelerator.
Can sketch it for you if you don't see what I mean.

[Steven Sesselmann]

With this new approach to how to fuse Deuterium (which must work to some extent since you did have neutron production in your last test, right?), do you have a formula for the maximum velocity difference that still allows the ions to fuse?

No, I don't have this, and even if I did, it wouldn't be very accurate. there will always be a Maxwellian distribution of particle velocities, but I guess the aim is to move the bell curve towards the left (lower velocity). i believe this is what happens in a regular fusor, just not that effectively.

Steven