Physics education research, electronic materials, and the musings of Christopher Moore, Ph.D.
Physics education research, electronic materials, and the musings of Christopher Moore, Ph.D.
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Using a Van De Graaff (VDG) machine, we can easily generate million-volt high voltage. The high potential difference can be generated effectively with minimum energy supplied to the machine. The larger the volume of the machine would be, the higher the voltage could get. However, stability would be a problem when the voltage gets to over 10 million-volts. This issue could be resolved with ‘magnified’ machine design. For example,
VDG1, VDG2, VDG3 ==> VDGA
VDG4, VDG5, VDG6 ==> VDGB
VDG7, VDG8, VDG9 ==> VDGC
…
VDGA, VDGB, VDGC ==> VDGX
In that case, VDGA works like a magnifier which aggregates the positive charge (or negative charge conducted from smaller VDGs) and collectively ‘magnifies’ the voltage to higher voltage. Of course, a portion of the positive charge could be lost in the process. However, it could theoretically be possible to keep majority of it until the voltage gets elevated to 100 million volts or higher. With such high voltage working on the deuterium or tritium, gas mixture which could be mixed from a source of gaseous catalyst, selected from the group consisting of beryllium, carbonates, hydroxides, halides, sulfates, phosphates, and sulfides. The reaction produces natural lightning, or occasional fusion reaction if you like.
Someone might argue natural lightning would not produce fusion. First of all, the design described here is not about real natural lightning. You don't get to manipulate real natural lightning with the addition of deuterium or tritium in the picture. Second, real natural lightning has voltage in the range of a few million to at most 10 million volts. You don't get as high voltage as the design theoretically could (if it works).
Surely, other fusion methods such as Inertial Confinement or Magnetic Confinement could produce fusion. However, none of these experiments could produce higher output than input and sustaining fusion. In fact, the focus seems to be in ‘heating it up’. Natural lightning would no doubt produce higher energy than those methods because of the high electronic voltage to preserve its current. It seems the wrong area of researches has dominated fusion methods of the past few decades.
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You do not undersand inertial confinement, since it operates on basically the same principle you are sort of describing: a very high voltage accelerating particles into each other.
The problem you run into is one of conservation of energy. I can get hundreds of thousands of volts from a van der Graaf plugged into the wall. However, I'm confined to about 400 W so the current through the gas will be extremely low. It doesn't matter so much that I have hundreds of thousands of volts. The particles can only gain as much kinetic energy as you put in (in this case, 400 J per second).
Even still, fusion reactions are perfectly capable of occuring (and they will in great number) with 400 W of power and a well-designed inertial confinement system.
The focus of magnetic and inertial confinement is not "heating it up". The focus is geting the particles to smash into each other. For inertial confinement you can plug a HV power supply into the wall, generate a plasma that is about the temperature of the surface of the sun, and get some fairly impressive fussion yields. Things get hot when you give them energy. That's just what they do. So of course you end up with something that is "heated up".
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I would like to thank Chris for his response. Nevertheless, I would like to clarify the points here: (a) the process I described here is not about sustaining fusion, instead it is about energy from simulated naturing lightning without repeated strikes; (b) the voltage is theorertically a lot higher than the inertial confinement you are talking about here (if it works). I don't think there was ever experiement getting any near 100 million volts. Hence, we cannot be sure what may happen unless there is already facts/figures showing otherwise. BTW, the existing experiment is about continue to heat it up to achieve sustaining fusion, am I right?
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