EMC2 Bussard Fusion Dr Park Spoke about the status of the project

Here is a summarize the relevant gleanings briefly from an attendee from Talk Polywell

1) Dr. Park is interested in trying to form the potential well as the next step in the research program.

2) There was a discussion between Dr. Park and Prof. Forest about MHD (magneto hydro dynamics) and the lack of axial symmetry. Dr. Park’s conclusion was that it’s very difficult to address high-beta with a PIC code, but high beta is necessary to explain the improved confinement of fast electrons. 3-D MHD codes have been tried on the Polywell but the results don’t agree with the PIC results. More MHD work by collaborators would be nice.

3) Dr. Park would also like to map out the magnetic field, but it will be difficult to do in a pulsed experiment. The discharges are short, and they are quite dynamic due to the gun formation (he showed a video of the visible emission from the two blobs of plasma from each gun as they collided in the center and wiggled around). He said they’ve only take 50 shots, because they have to ‘reload’ the gun each time they fire.

4) In the future, he’d like to have a longer plasma sustainment time than the guns can provide, and then implement Thomson scattering diagnostic to measure the density and temperature more accurately.

5)There is evidently a sweet spot at 2.7 kG [kiloGauss?]; lowering the magnetic field to 1.6 kG doesn’t produce as good results, even though that means beta is higher. They don’t really know why this is true.

6) DoE funding is unlikely in the future, Dr. Park thinks China or possibly Korea may be interested though.

7) the confinement time is theorized to scale as the 3/2 [half cube] power of the energy of the electrons, so it would be easier to confine very hot electrons than cold ones.

8) Expect more publications in the future.
He promised to send the slides from his talk.

This film explains how the polywell works, in 15 minutes. It is organized into 7 parts:

I – 0:00 Introduction
II – 1:23 The Geometry of Bussards Machine
III – 3:54 The Mechanism
IV – 9:13 Plasma Details
V – 11:55 Scale Up
VI -12:27 The Next Step
VII – 13:31 Citations

You can learn more at:
http://www.talkpolywell.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
http://thepolywellblog.blogspot.com/
http://prometheusfusionperfection.com/
http://www.polywellnuclearfusion.com/

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