Refocusing on Fusion
A year on are the folks at Lawrencevile Plasma Physics any closer to positive fusion? They’re getting warmer.
This article is a follow-up on a previous one that I wrote over a year ago, The Experiment that May Change the World, regarding the Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP) company’s effort to achieve net positive energy from a Dense Plamsa Focus Fusion device using the Boron to Helium nuclear reaction.
Earlier this week the scientists at LPP realeased a progress report announcing that they have achieved a very significant milestone. They have repeatedly achieved to rigorous scientific standards the billon degrees + temperature required for Boronic fusion in their device.
Although it should be noted that these temperatures were not achieved with Boron but with Deuterium (a hydrogen atom with an extra neutron).
Over the last year they have been experimenting with hydrogen instead of Boron because it fuses at lower temperatures than Boron, allowing them the experiment with ways to increase reaction yields and temperatures with real fusion reactions. Now that they have proven that they can achieve the extremely high temperature required for Boronic fusion they will in the coming months start experimenting with it in their device.
I’ll give a quick overview of their progress and achievements over the past year and a bit:
- From the very first day they have had timing and pre-firing problems with the switches they use to release the electric charge stored in capacitor bank into the device. Getting the capacitors to discharge collectively to within the margin required (of less than 20 nanoseconds – a very hard engineering challenge) was a continuing problem for most of the first year. However by studying the underlying problem and reiteratively improving the switch design they managed to successfully achieve repeatable simulatenous discharge.
- They have successfully confirmed their hypothesis that they can increase the temperature and yield by applying an axial magnetic field during the build-up phase of plasmoid formation. This has given them at least an order of magnitude improvement in yield.
- Throughout the experiments they have been progressively increasing the energy released. This has been achieved by re-tweeking the machine with the guidance from the knowledge and experience gained by each shot run and mathematical modelling of the expected behaviour of the plasma. The progress made is nothing short of spectacular – chewing through orders-of-magnitude increases in yield.
So what’s in store for the future?
Well the breakthrough of billon+ temperatures has greatly increased the chance of large yields of boron fusion leading to net energy. However, it is still not a certainty they will achieve net energy. The team themselves acknowledge this – this is genuine science they are doing, they don’t assume or claim that their hypotheses are comfirmed until the experimental results have been repeatedly produced. To achieve net energy still requires massive increases in reaction yields.
Further experimentation over this year will reveal whether they can achieve it or not.
foggy
January 17, 2011 at 6:10 pm
expected behavior
seems like a feat.something big like the Haddron collider.what interests me is the mathematical modelling of the expected behavior of plasma.is there a database for chemical substances.like the human Genome systems? it would be nice to do predictive experiments with such a model.know something?experimental science has become an exciting read; the news of the results of each phase of experiment.feel like a series match, egging on the research side to win!