by Doug Coulter » Thu Nov 27, 2014 2:37 pm
We've tried mutl-concentric grids here, mostly since before this board existed. For various reasons, not all understood, none of them worked out well at all.
Yes, while we have ions, we also have a net-negative charge in there. Anything that tries to go more than a couple hundred volts above ground - even a foot from the action - sees a huge load to ground from all the free electrons hitting it.
No matter how we biased the outer grid/inner grid, we got more power draw, less fusion, less Q. We obviously didn't try everything - power supply limits and so on, but we tried a lot of things.
It appears more like we have a rather strange mix of ions with closely following electrons, kind of a polarized plasma (with extra electrons, which kind of makes some sense since we have this large negative supply pumping them in, secondary emission etc).
It could be that these unbound but close by electrons even get closer than they do when bound (look at the wavefunctions for bound ones, they have little probability near the nucleus), and do so often - they may be helping, in fact, by neutralizing some of the Coloumb repulstion until just the right moment.
Recent experiments with RF show that in some special cases we seem to be able to "mumbledepeg*" the ions into one another, perhaps using this effect, all I know is we got reproducible far higher output and Q in a couple of experiments doing that. Since then, I've not been running in that mode, since my shielding is inadequate to maintain my health at those levels of output, so that's why the sudden bunch of reports here on how I'm setting up remote control, I plan to do this from another building further away.
We are not even sure at this point that most of the fusion is at the focus. We do know that at least some of it is at the tank walls, where there is always some D embedded unti lthey get hot - you can measure it by locality of fusion with a hornyak or bubble detector (we have) and by noting a reduction in total output as vs wall temperature, which drives out the D, so there's no target. I plan to build a new pinhole camera with a magnet in it to reject light charged particles (eg electrons) to look at an image of fast protons from fusion and see where it's really happening, inspired by an energy analyzer first developed at the University of Wisconson. Theirs didn't make an image, though they got a very rough idea using a moveable obscuring plate of something. Mine will make an image, probably multiple ones for various E/M ratios, X rays, and velocities. We'll just have to see what that looks like. I suspect a fair amount of fusion, at this point, is beam on beam, but not all at the focus. Things are going both directions in those fan beams coming out of the grid.
* An old game of knife throwing where you try to hit point first from a distance, by spinning it end over end. Bored old drunk guys would do this so the knife hit between their spread fingers on the table, when a mistake is well, not advisable and rather messy.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.