New record for fusion

a reply to: D8Tee

Antigravity?
FTL travel?
It's all facets, if one facet becomes known, the rest follows.
I subscribe (in part) to the electric universe theory. Everything is electrical, everything is vibration, just like Tesla said.

And most of that has been proven already, but i'm always open to new ideas, i like to put them in context with what is known. I mean known as in what is possible, verified etc and not what the general public think they know.

Anything is possible, it just needs an explanation, is a good starting point.

I have found several articles at Ars Technica about nuclear fusion actually explained by nuclear physicists that are worth sharing.

First up, Wendelstein 7-X and very well written account of the difference between a tokomak and a stellarators.

(with the horrible title) June 9, 2017 - Wibbly-wobbly Magnetic Fusion Stuff: the Return of the Stellarator.

Some older articles explaining confinement schemes.

Reverse Field Pinch explained (2009): Smaller reactor design for fusion may work in a “pinch”

Polywell confinement (2015): Magnetic mirror holds promise for fusion.

The last two together are the schemes used by Lockheed in their compact fusion reactor. LM uses the best of both schemes in their design. There is a good explanation of the following concept...

The reason I mention this is that one can differentiate between the natural pressure of the plasma and the pressure applied by a magnetic field. The ratio of these two, called beta, is an important parameter in fusion reactors. Essentially, the efficiency of fusion goes up rapidly as beta approaches one, so magnetic compression aims to get beta as close to that level as possible.

(Ars Technica, Magnetic Mirror...)

Lockheed said their design could get a beta of 1... or more!

An article up at Power Technology about lithium's use in a tokamak. PPPL researchers went to China's EAST reactor last December. They had previously demonstrated the liquid lithium limiter as a first-wall. This time though they added a powdered lithium injector. With both running, they were able to demonstrate the powdered lithium could be shot into turbulent plasmas to smooth them out! The article seems written by a non-English speaker then translated because it is start-stop so the above description is what I got out of it. Oh, there are advert overlays on the article too! So IE users beware!

Armed with this data I bet the Princeton guys plug this all back into their computer controls and simulations. Yet one more step to controlling a plasma and extracting the heat!

PowerTechnology.com, June 19, 2017 - Researchers find lithium effective in nuclear fusion,

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Interesting stuff, and we thought Lithium was only good for batteries! They are not easy to handle, i have had to design 3 different charging systems for the b*ggers.

Good work dude, i thought that the original stellarator was a kind of figure 8 shaped plasma device and the man operating it looked a lot like Eric Laithwaite, but that could just be an Alzheimer moment LOL

I really thought that the torus-shaped field would be our final answer, because that would give us a rotating mag field as you would need for a UFO (flux liner) type of drive.

But magnetic fields tend to be spirals, so why not try a spiral of plasma?

This was an idea i had decades ago involving a transformer but then with a (fusing) turn (or turns) of a high density plasma carrying impossible amounts of current. Like 2,000 amps per turn of current density.
It seems someone else got there first, i gather the first experiments took place in the late 50's and may be a result of Tesla's lost papers.

Neumann interpreted this somewhat differently and discovered that the materials used and the density thereof made a big difference. The more copper the better, this seems to be born out in the Flux-Liner design, somewhat.

I would like to say more on this subject but i am held by an oath to keep the final details secret, until such time as no other options exist.
Keep the info going

a reply to: playswithmachines

Literally none of the things you claim have been proven in any way.

Recent experiments on the Lithium Tokamak Experiment (LTX), the first facility to fully surround plasma with liquid lithium, showed that lithium coatings can produce temperatures that stay constant all the way from the hot central core of the plasma to the normally cool outer edge. The findings confirmed predictions that high edge temperatures and constant or nearly constant temperature profiles would result from the ability of lithium to keep stray plasma particles from kicking—or recycling—cold gas from the walls of a tokamak back into the edge of the plasma.

Researchers performed this set of experiments with solid lithium, Boyle explained, but a coating of liquid lithium could produce similar results. Physicists have long used both forms of lithium to coat the walls of LTX. Since flowing liquid lithium could absorb hot particles but wouldn't wear down or crack when struck by them, it also would reduce damage to tokamak walls - another critical challenge for fusion.

phys.org, July 5, 2017 - Researchers demonstrate first hot plasma edge in a fusion facility.

An experiment in the US with at least a decent article!

Liquid lithium limiters (liquid lithium first-wall) cuts down on embrittlement but more importantly--creates a constant temperature from the inner plasma out to the edge! That cuts down on turbulence and all the monitoring needed to prevent those conditions from occurring. This is major news!

You can also breed tritium from lithium which cuts down on the cost of buying your fuel. Just go get your graphene filter and cut your deuterium creation time down.

Let's see. Computer controls... check. Liquid lithium limiter... check. Heating capability... check (neutral beam injectors). Diverter... check. All we need is an increase in magnetic pressure and demonstration of sufficient containment time!

@pwm - One of these days will we see what you are up to?? Sounds interesting!

China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) made an important advance by achieving a stable 101.2-second steady-state high confinement plasma, setting a world record in long-pulse H-mode operation on the night of July 3rd.
...

All the plasma parameters, including recycling, and particle and heat fluxes, reached a truly steady state after 20 seconds—the wall saturation time for the W divertor—and remained stable until the end of the discharge.

phys.org, July 6, 2017 - China's 'artificial sun' sets world record with 100 second steady-state high performance plasma.

I saw this at Next Big Future but it was a google translation from Chinese. They ran this in "H-mode" or "high confinement" which is the plasma being under pressure (instead of just pulsing a low density pulse and then trapping it). The peak heat was 50 million K (or 15 million °C) which is better than their 60-second run. The big complaint of the EAST reactor news is that their temperatures were not high enough.

Compared to the 6 second plasma discharge in the W7-X reactor that is a massive improvement! EAST still does not have the heat but they are showing it can be done. The reactor is China's contribution to ITER and other plasma research (they tested PPPL's liquid lithium limiter there last year). Finding out that it 20 seconds to calm down is nice to know! Great achievement in the quest for a working nuclear fusion reactor!

Meanwhile the US is doing?? Oh yeah, NTSX-U had that accident and they shut it down for a year.

ETA: TheRegister.co.uk article with temps

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Now that is cool (or rather not)

I bet they produce that pressure with a masive coil, i.e. a high mag field density.

It is then possible to make a filament, very thin but a million degrees in the middle.And more easily controlled than the usual torus, which as y'all know suffers from so-called 'kink instability'...

This then fuses, expands, and as a result, pruduces an EMF force on the coil.
See how easy it actually is? I have positive yet unconfirmed reports that this is Tesla technology, i will know more when i get back from vacation and start sorting a few TB of data, oh yes, quantum tunneling, that's part of it too...
I hope i get time to catch up on all the links provided,
This is fun!

a reply to: playswithmachines

Enjoy your vacation!

We all need to unplug every now and then! It has taken 60 years to get to 100 seconds so a few more days (on average) will not be "break-through" or anything. I'll be here, posting links, news, and updates (making lame jokes, getting stuff wrong... the typical!)

The stellarator Wendelstein 7-X has received its first divertor. Just one step closer towards realising plasma pulse lengths of half an hour without breaking the machine
...

“The higher heat handling capabilities of the divertor allows us to make longer pulses with higher energy input”, says Arturo Alonso, W7-X‘s task force leader. A divertor takes the energy that is split out from the main plasma. It diverts waste particles directly into the trash with the help of magnetic field lines. For the first operational period of Wendelstein 7-X (from 10th December 2015 to 10th March 2016) a limiter had to do the job of the actual divertor, but its performance was quite “limited”.

Now that the divertor is in place and the wall elements made of copper-chromium-zirconium have been covered by graphite tiles, researchers expect extended pulse lengths of about one minute, as the permitted energy input per discharge moves from 4 Megajoule up to 80 Megajoule, a 20 fold increase in terms of renergy input!

euro-fusion.org, July 12, 2017 - Finally, a divertor! – Wendelstein powers up.

The target date is the end of August to get everything up and running (and cooling). They now have the ability to divert particles and any impurities out through the divertor. They had a scoop up called a limiter doing that function. None of the walls were covered so thy could only get so hot of a plasma for so long before they had to end the shot. The main goal of the first phase was to get the magnetic fields measured and tested.

Next up? Get the plasma under control for up to a minute. They cannot go much longer because they are using passive cooling at the moment. Active cooling is coming and they are shooting for having that up and running in 2020*.

*All the info in the previous two paragraphs are spread throughout the article which is kind of short which limits how much I can post without posting the whole thing.

Nice to see the divertor put in!

Fusion-orama Updates

The suppressed instability is called a global Alfvén eigenmode (GAE)—a common wave-like disturbance that can cause fusion reactions to fizzle out. Suppression was achieved with a second neutral beam injector recently installed as part of the NSTX-U upgrade. Just a small amount of highly energetic particles from this second injector was able to shut down the GAEs.

phys.org, Aug. 18, 2017 - A quick and easy way to shut down instabilities in fusion devices.

A second neutral beam injector used to smooth out GAE which causes interior heat in the plasma out toward the edge (where it can touch the wall of the reactor and reduce overall heat in the plasma). The experiment actually matched computer code that suggested this would work. Having that computer code validated is as big news as the achievement of smoothing out the plasma.

The redesigned parts, called pole shields, protect magnets in the injectors from the energetic particles from the beam and will replace units that melted and cracked during previous fusion experiments, resulting in water leaks. The magnets redirect charged [...] ions in the beams to an ion dump inside the injectors, permitting only neutral atoms to enter into the plasma.

The new shields consist of half-inch thick, roughly five-foot long copper plates equipped with inserts of the hard, silvery metal molybdenum in the center of the plates, the area that will absorb the most energy from the beam.

phys.org, Aug. 18, 2017 - Engineers deliver new key components to help power a fusion energy experiment.

Those new injectors have longer lasting heat shields that snap together like Legos with a copper sandwich between.

At MIT, researchers have focused their attention on using radio-frequency (RF) heating in magnetic confinement fusion experiments

The new approach [...] uses a fuel composed of three ion species: hydrogen, deuterium, and trace amounts (less than 1 percent) of helium-3. Typically, plasma used for fusion research in the laboratory would be composed of two ion species, deuterium and hydrogen or deuterium and He-3, with deuterium dominating the mixture by up to 95 percent. Researchers focus energy on the minority species, which heats up to much higher energies owing to its smaller fraction of the total density.

The new method has resulted in raising trace amounts of ions to megaelectronvolt (MeV) energies — an order of magnitude greater than previously achieved.

Porkolab suggests that the new approach could be helpful for MIT’s collaboration with the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany.

News.MIT.edu - Aug. 21, 2017 = Fusion heating gets a boost.

Sorry for the multiple cuts and pastes but the article is written as a "news" story and the important parts are scattered around. And out of order. I think these are all the tasty parts.

First, they are using radio frequency (RF) heating (kind of like microwaves but with higher energy). Second, they are using a plasma that is not designed to fuse but run at higher temperatures. This is to explore high temperature plasmas without having to shield everything from high energy neutrons flying all around. And look, helium-3 has made an appearance! Third, this is the type of heating that will be done at W7-X in the future. Right now, they have the divertor units and the carbon tiles (I think they are still being installed). In the future, they will upgrade to RF injectors to reach density, pressure, and temps for fusion. Looks like MIT has the RF injectors ready!

MeV is sweet!! Injector shields and GAE suppression... these are huge news items that on their own are dull and boring but when you see them all together it gives my inner fusionfanboy warm, fuzzy feelings!!

PS - Although not mentioned, the Lockheed Compact Fusion Reactor uses RF and Neutral Beam injectors. So they get a benefit in knowing they can heat their plasma to the proper temps too. Actually, any tokamak experiment will benefit from the GAE suppression.

Still under peer review as of press time was a paper submitted to the journal Physics of Plasmas, in which Lerner and his coauthors claim to have produced a confined mean ion energy of 200 kiloelectron volts, equivalent to a temperature of over 2 billion kelvins. “As far as we know, that’s a record for any fusion plasma,” Lerner says.

Now on a new crowdfunding campaign to upgrade its DPF reactor, LPPFusion says it hopes to be fusing proton and boron by next year. (The results LPPFusion has obtained to date have involved deuterium plasmas.)

IEEE Spectrum, Sept. 22, 2017 - Startup: LPPFusion Embraces Instability.

A few terms. Deuterium-Tritium (D-T) are hydrogen isotopes used as fuel. This reaction creates helium and fast moving neutrino. Temps need to be over 100 million °C (at proper density). The record they are talking about is JET tokomak in the UK. They got up to 300 million °C and generated 14 MW (IIRC) of energy. They down side is they put in 25 MW or so. The race is on to hit break even by reaching ignition and a self sustaining fusion reaction (just add more fuel and a bit more heat).

LPPFusion is doing the proton-Boron (p-B) reaction. That one does not produce a neutrino but yields electricity. They need to also reach higher temperatures. I think is near to 10 billion Kelvin is the temperature they need to reach.

Cool they got that far! What I am getting tired of is, "New Record Reached!" announcements followed by, "We need more funding". Seems to be the case each time.

I hope this is not a scam but it would seem if you were trying to actually make a fusion reactor of some sorts you would want to announce "We have done it" instead of these small steps.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Fun facts to read, as usual TEOT i salute you in your untiring work on bringing us these facts.

As you may already know, T fusion gives you more energy per gram than D2 does. All well & good.
The problem with T3 (Tritium) or He-3 (commonly known as He-3 or Heloum-3) is the extra proton.

Extra proton isotopes are somewhat unstable, but decay in a very predctable manner, more bang for your buck, but also more risk. The stray neutron has a lot more power & is called a fast neutron.

That is why i am helping the development of the D2 reactor, fuel is ready to hand, it is relatively safe, and extra fuel can be made by bombarding normal H2 with neutrons.

Sorry busy right now, but i will get back to this thread...
-PWM-

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Ah the Stellarator, the original figure 8 shaped reactor, also the first ever that i saw working!

More to come, fundamental changes to all, that we all will benefit from this tech......Keep on the job, mate!

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Love you for that!
-PWM-

Hi, ya'll! (If anybody besides PWM is still tuning in! lol)

There has not been much happening in the world of nuclear fusion reactors to provide updates.

Here is one with a video!

A little background on terms and what you will be seeing.

In your tokomak reactors they run in two different modes. When not trying to achieve actual nuclear fusion they run in Low Confinement mode; the magnetic fields are just keeping the plasma from touching the reactor vessel on a low amount of plasma. When stepping up to explore what happens with higher density plasmas and hotter temperatures, then they are running in High Confinement mode. These typically referred to as L-mode and H-mode.

The video below shows what happens when going from L mode to H mode within a tokomak. At about the 0:22 mark you can see the loose plasma arrange itself into a certain form. If you look closely, you will see filaments on the surface wrapping around in crisscrossing directions. Those filaments are either hotter or moving faster than the ones below then the whole thing stabilizes again!

YouTube - Fusion experiment: MAST Plasma


The researchers were setting various parameters seeing how they affect the transition between L mode and H mode. Nobody has done this before! They found out that they do not need the full plasma density prior to the transition which means less power in (heat) and lower plasma current which, when all is said and done, means the theoretical limits for nuclear fusion have been effectively lowered. They can also ignore electron heating and concentrate on ion heating because that is where heat (flux) can cause turbulence. Control that and you well on your way!

The paper at iopscience.iop.org: Experimental evidence for the key role of the ion heat channel in the physics of the L–H transition.

A video from inside a tokomak is friggin' cool!

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Hey there Teot,
There has been some cool ancillary stuff,

Helium channels is nanomaterials

"Helium is an element that we don't usually think of as being harmful," said Dr. Michael Demkowicz, associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. "It is not toxic and not a greenhouse gas, which is one reason why fusion power is so attractive."

However, if you force helium inside of a solid material, it bubbles out, much like carbon dioxide bubbles in carbonated water.

"Literally, you get these helium bubbles inside of the metal that stay there forever because the metal is solid," Demkowicz said. "As you accumulate more and more helium, the bubbles start to link up and destroy the entire material."

And what I thought was new but is not and still cool

Cooling fusion plasma with neon

Fusion energy researchers have discovered that they can rapidly extinguish and cool a magnetically confined fusion plasma hotter than the center of the sun by injecting a large quantity of neon gas to prevent damage to fusion-energy devices when there is a loss of plasma equilibrium.

a reply to: punkinworks10

Thanks for the contribution!

I saw the helium bubble story. It does not say if they were using the liquid lithium first wall or not. I wonder if they will try the same experiments with a liquid lithium limiter. I've seen a couple stories out there that read, "Scientists need helium barrier metal to make fusion happen", which is not what the article is saying at all. They said that multilayered material can create channels that connect together and those might be useful to do things like helium removal, heat removal, and possibly adding heat. Wendelstein 7-X is to test their diverter which removes impurities and helium particles from the plasma. I did not realize that tritium is not utilized as much in the D-T reaction. The diverter will also recycle the tritium for re-injection.

Earlier, somebody asked about why the fusion steady climb leveled off in the 1980s. I said it was superconducting magnets had reached a flat spot. I have also been mentioning the second generation magnets, REBCO in particular. I went off to do some reading...

Although successful, there are a number of problems associated with the nature of the TSMG [Top Seeded Melt Growth] technique, including porosity, sample shrinkage and inhomogeneity in the distribution RE-211 [rare earth yttrium] content throughout the volume of sample, which leads to inefficient flux pinning. As a result, a new process based on top seeded infiltration and growth (TSIG) has been developed relatively recently as an alternative approach for the fabrication of large (RE)BCO single grains. The TSIG technique yields samples that are more dense, more uniform and have potentially better properties than those produced by TSMG. However, it is considerably more challenging to fabricate large-sized samples by this technique due to the relative complexity of the process. We describe the TSIG process and its application to a variety of (RE)BCO bulk superconductors and report the successful fabrication of single grains of up to 37.5 mm in diameter YBCO by a novel, 2-step TSIG process. This process enables a straightforward and very reliable growth process, which has clear practical implications for the manufacture of bulk samples for commercial applications.

indico.cern.ch (abstract) - Large Diameter, Single Grain (RE)BCO Bulk Superconductors Fabricated by Infiltration and Growth.

While they can make the flat tape that is good enough, the REBCO usage has problems at the single crystal level. They are about to create the second generation REBCO. Who knows how many Tesla those will be. As they are cooled even further than their high operational temperatures they can carry even more current. If they can hit 35 - 40 T then the whole size of the reactor shrinks.

Maybe Lockheed was onto something after all with "smaller is better". Distribute a couple or three around a major city instead of one huge edifice... makes sense.

In 2015, TAE reported that it was able to keep a high-temperature plasma stable for 5 milliseconds in its C-2U plasma generator, marking a significant advance for the field. Since then, the company has upgraded to an even more capable machine that’s nicknamed Norman — in honor of the company’s late co-founder, Norman Rostoker.

TAE is partnering with Google to optimize Norman’s plasma configuration using artificial intelligence, and this month, Binderbauer announced that the company achieved the colliding and merging of field-reversed configurations [FRC] on the new machine.

“FRCs are a critical component of plasma confinement and stability,” Binderbauer said. “Thanks to our previous insights from C-2U, Norman’s plasma will be both hotter and more stable from the outset.”

GeekWire.com, Nov. 30, 2017 - TAE fusion venture wins supercomputer time — and reports progress on test device.

First off, I did not hear about the name change! Tri Alpha Energy (the "tri" three, "alpha" as in "alpha particle", is how they envision their fusion device working), is now "TAE Technologies". These are the guys who have Paul Allen (Microsoft) on their side (funder). They are shooting plasma rings at each other then trapping them in a magnetic field and pounding them with lasers! They want to do the anuetronic proton-Boron reaction which requires higher temperatures than the D-T reaction.

Secondly, they need to do all their own modeling because their plasma will be different than everybody else. That is what this announcement is all about. They now have access to both Argonne National Labs and Oak Ridge National Labs' super computers (31 million core-hours on a Cray XC40!) to run the simulations.

Last, they have upgraded their previous fusion device by making it bigger and incorporating some other equipment that were previously only tested as parts; now all those parts are on new device they have called, "Norman", in honor of the one of the late co-founders. As the blurb states, the new device will be better right from the get go. If they can run their models on the supercomputers... who knows?
(all the hard info from same source)



And because it is so cool... Wendelstein 7-X now ready for virtual tours!. (There is a url at the announcement for a panoramic tour of 7-X)

I found a Weekly Highlights newsletter at the PPPL site.

H. Neilson visited Japan's National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) for a series of discussions on topics for stellarator collaboration. A highlight of the visit was a tour of the Large Helical Device (LHD) pellet injection system, which ingeniously combines a 20-pellet burst system with a continuous repeating pneumatic injector. ... The discussions were held in the context of a collaboration, involving ORNL, NIFS, Germany's Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, and PPPL to provide a continuous pellet fueling system for the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator to meet fueling requirements similar to those of LHD

pppl.gov (pdf) - The PPPL Highlights for the week ending December 2, 2017.

The main weekly highlights PDF news letters are here.

The Japan team presented all the specs and details of their pellet feeder over to the IPP team for the W7-X. How cool is that! That is one reason I like fusion research... nothing is held back! The China EAST device tested out PPPL's liquid lithium limiter for possible use in ITER. The team in Wisconsin shot lithium powder into their stellarator and handed the results to UCLA who shared with IPP who shared with Japan! All their findings are published on the arXiv to share with other fusion researchers around the world.

Fusion science is cool like that!