Joe Jarski wrote:I'm still trying to make sense of the patent. There are several things that either I don't understand yet, or it just doesn't look like it would work - unless there are some important details left out, but a few problems that I see are...
1. Pulling the ions out of the storage ring to the center
2. Getting the ions to go to the center where they would collide
3. Getting them back into the storage ring without hitting the chamber walls
I'm very much a beginner at this stuff, but is it even possible for the ring magnet to cause enough of a bend to send the ions to the center?
I'll have to get a sketch posted of what I had in mind.
So let's imagine you are a 50 keV deuteron travelling around a storage ring which is 1m radius. Your speed is around 2 Mm/s so that means the radial force to provide the centripetal acceleration towards the centre is 1.6E-14 N. Now imagine that 1.6E-14 N is made up of 4.8E-15 N from a B field of 750 Gauss, and -3.2E-15 N [that is, it is outwards-directed] made up of electric field with a field gradient of 20,000 V/m (200 V/cm).
(You can see that all these figures are very reasonable. This is the way it is; a device of around 1 m in size is very amenable to this field arrangement as it is not at all arduous for ions at fusion energies.)
Anyhows, now imagine that this electric field is turned off while you are in the beam. All of a sudden, you are now looking at a 4.8E-15 N force towards the centre, so your radius of gyration drops by a third which causes you to turn towards the centre of the device. The magnetic field is arranged so that as it curves around, at the moment it is heading towards the centre, the mag field has eased off and it now heads towards the centre in a straight line. If it misses, then it will simply recover back into the storage ring, by the reverse process.
This number-crunching is exactly the same for my device; I have an outwardly directed e-field and with the orbit/B-field configured so there is a magnetic force inwards. When these two quantities balance with the centripetal force, so the orbit is stable. The orbit is therefore governed by Bqwr=mrw^2+Eq (w=omega=rotational velocity).