LC POPS

A resonant circuit at the natural POPS frequency might be a way to generate POPS energy without an RF supply.

It should go in series with the DC supply and be just before the grid input connection to the reactor.

This would make any RF generated naturally synchronized with the internal oscillations of the reactor. Phasing could be adjusted some by detuning the tuned ckt.

A good low impedance capacitor from the HV input to the LC circuit to the ground side of the supply would be a very good idea.

This is beginning to look a lot like Tesla Coil country. In fact this Tesla Coil CAD program might be of some use for coil winding and calculating resonant frequencies. Or formulas if you want to check the prepackaged calculators or roll your own. A list of Tesla CAD programs. A self resonance coil calculator.

You can check them against this equation as long as the coil desired is at least as long as its diameter.

Fmhz = (29.85 x (H/D)^1/5)/(N*D)

F= self resonant frequency in Mhz of an 'isolated' coil
H= coil height in meters
D= coil diameter in meters
N= total number of turns

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Update: 03 Feb 008 0714z



If the coils are made close to self resonance then a very small capacitor can be used to resonate the coil. That means the unit could be tuned over a small range by putting a sheet of dielectric between the capacitor plates.

The first thing to do is to get your fusor operating properly and then use a spectrum analyzer or 100KHz to 30 MHz radio receiver to find out what the natural frequency is.

A high frequency capacitive voltage divider with a diode detector hooked to the HV between the LC and the grid would be a good idea for tuning the coil. Tune for maximum RF.

The HV side could be from .5 to 2 pF (depending on frequency). With the low side capacitance on the order of 50 to 200pF (dependent on the high side capacitance). What you want is 100:1 divide ratio. Roughly. To start. If you use a 1N4148 diode as a detector. You should be able to go from about 100 VAC to 3000 VAC (diode limit is 3750 VAC - actually 1/2 of 75 PIV guaranteed*100). If the voltages you get are outside that range adjust your divider accordingly. The exact range is not too important as you are using it for tuning and not measurement. A voltage in the range of 5 to 10 V at peak output should give plenty of margin and yet give good tuning indication.

A lot is going to depend on lead dress. Keep everything as short as possible. The leads and everything that they contact is now part of your tuned circuit. As much as possible on the HV DC go for a single point ground.

What I'm thinking is that we have a Q multiplier here. If we use Q multiplication to raise the RF at the grid that should enhance the production of RF further raising the RF drive.

It will be interesting to see if it has any effect on fusion output. And what it does to losses.

Any way there is something like a 10% or 20 % chance we will do it this way. If it works you could control the feedback by adjusting the tuning.

Another way to tune it to start would be to use a fluorescent tube in the vicinity and tune for maximum brightness. That should be good enough to start.

Let me add one minor word of caution. We may not use this on the initial test devices until we are sure of the stability and frequency of POPS. For testing it would be more useful to have a power amplifier driven system with octave band output filters.

I have put a bit up at fusor.net about this and it seems there is an interested party. If he gets results I might change my attitude.

A while back some folks were fantasizing about how to use a Tesla coil to run a fusion machine. It looks like it might be the other way around.

Update:

Here is another design idea for how to do POPS that will be a little safer. The coil and tuning capacitor both have one end grounded. Again. A star ground for the HV will tend to reduce common mode voltages and currents.

Note that C includes coil self capacitance.


If the output of POPS is low a good rough indicator would be a NE-2 neon lamp [pdf]. Get the ones with leads. You can also raise the sensitivity by applying an AC voltage (mains power) to the lamp.

I built one of these 50 years ago when I was in the process of getting my my first Amateur license, K0NMR. They work pretty good.

Update: 04 Feb 008 0521z

Have a look at the wiki on Klystron Tubes. It uses the natural bunching of electrons to create microwave frequencies. Since we will be using ions which weigh 3600 times as much as an electron (D-D) the frequencies will be 60 times lower.

POPS oscillation is proportional to (Vwell/Mion)^0.5/Rwell according to the POPS paper by Park. For a 30 KV supply voltage POPS should be around 6 MHz in a small Reactor. In any case it has a very high probability of being in the .1 to 30 MHz range.

Note that like a klystron the POPS oscillator frequency changes with operating voltage. Suppose we got an impossibly high Q of 1,000 for the tuned circuit. that would mean we needed to hold the frequency within better than .1% (1 part in 1,000) to get the maximum effect of the tuned circuit. That means holding the voltage steady to better than .2%. Difficult. Not impossible. Of course with lower Qs wider excursions are possible. It means low ripple and low voltage servo variations. Servo variations of under .1 % imply open loop gains in the passband of over 1,000. Some fun.

Say we use 80 stacked 1,000 V @ 10 A supplies. The supplies would have to regulate to better than 1 V at full output and have less than 1 V ripple. At 30 KHz operating frequency that implies an output capacitance of 22 uF @ 1500 V rating. Able to carry 5A 30KHz AC without excessive dissipation.

Since this will effectively be an 80 phase supply due to the sequential firing of the stacked modules there will be some reduction of output ripple due to the stacking. That will come in handy at lower voltages where the allowable ripple becomes less.

The allowable bandwidth of the voltage control servo is in the 1 KHz to 3 KHz range due to the 30KHz operating frequency of the switching supplies.

It may also be possible to mechanically slew the tuned circuit frequency by .2% with a speaker capable of 10 KHz response connected to a small segment of the tuning capacitor. If that was the case, as long as the system was relatively stable in the 100 microsecond time frame the tuned circuit could be kept on frequency. A VSWR detector in the HV line could do that. What you would do is compare the phase of the RF current in the line with the phase of the RF voltage on the tuned circuit and use that to servo the speaker.

Here is how POPS might be done with Amplifiers. We might need to add in an automatic phase adjuster or a PLL to keep things properly tuned up. You can click on the dwg to make it larger.


Back of the envelope calculations say that for a 50 KV DC 50 Amp grid supply (2.5 MW) an RF Amplifier capable of 250 w to 1,000 w should do the trick if using an LC circuit is not practical.

I used the wrong envelope. If the p-p voltage required is 4% of the DC voltage that represents 2,000 V p-p. That would be roughly 1,500 VRMS. Assuming a the real component of the load is 1,000 ohms (same as the DC load) that gives about 25 KW. Doubling the p-p voltage would require about 100 KW.

At those kinds of powers it may be useful to run the RF generators from the HV DC supply.

Bussard Fusion Update

The New Mexican has some interesting news about the progress on Bussard Fusion Reactor.

Last August, as Bussard was losing his battle with cancer, the funds were restored with the support of Alan Roberts, EMC2's longtime Navy contract monitor. The company now has $1.8 million to pursue his work. If it is successful verifying the 2005 results, it would seek funding for a full-scale model, big enough to make net power, Nebel said. Bussard has estimated that such a demonstration model would cost about $200 million to build.

"Unless somebody can repeat and show other people that it's operating, it's really not scientifically acceptable," Hirsch said. But "if the idea works the way he thinks it could, and there's a good chance he's right, it will not take very big machine to show net energy."

The latest device, WB-7 (the WB refers to the children's toy Wiffle Ball), is currently under construction at a machine shop in San Diego and will be shipped to Santa Fe, where a small group of scientists is setting up a testing facility in an office park off Rufina Street. The device, like previous ones, was designed by engineer Mike Skillercorn.

"These are garage-scale experiments," said Nebel, pointing to the stock tank purchased at a local feed store. "We shop at interesting places," he added, mentioning both Home Depot and the Black Hole in Los Alamos.

Although Europeans are building a huge device to demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of fusion power, the U.S. has spent relatively little — about $300 million a year — on fusion research. Much of that has been focused on a competing idea called Tokamak, a program that Bussard and Hirsch started at the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1970s, which uses deuterium and tritium as fuel. Later both determined that the concept, which produces a lot of radioactivity, was impractical from an engineering standpoint.

With his own device, Hirsch said, Bussard was "swimming upstream as far as fusion community was concerned." Still, he was able to get about $14 million in funding from the Navy for his work.

Bussard felt enormous pressure to solve the fusion problems. In a letter to an Internet forum on his 2005 results, Bussard wrote that he believed that "the survival of our high-tech civilizations depends on getting off of fossil fuels ASAP, and — if we do not — we will descend into a growing series of 'oil wars' and energy confrontations that can lead only to a huge cataclysm. Which CAN be circumvented if only we build the clean fusion machines in our time."

That is one of the reasons I support this research. Civilization depends on it.

Nearly a year after shutting down the lab, Bussard presented his work — for the first time in more than a decade — to the International Astronautical Congress. He later discussed his results with Google, the online search engine company in a talk titled, "Should Google Go Nuclear?" that is widely available on the Internet. Before his death, he also set up a nonprofit organization to solicit donations to restart the work. Information is at www.EMC2Fusion.org.

Bussard's wife, Dolly Gray, who co-founded EMC2 with him in 1985 and served as its president and CEO, has helped assemble the small team of scientists in Santa Fe. Besides Nebel, 54, the group includes Jaeyoung Park, a 37-year-old physicist who is also on leave from LANL; Mike Wray, the physicist who ran the key 2005 tests, and Wray's brother, Kevin, who is the computer guru for the operation.

"If this works, it's going to be a big deal. It could take the entire energy market," Nebel said. "And drag the oil companies into the 21st century," Gray added.

Someday, they said, if they're right, a machine just 20 times bigger than the one sitting in the corner on Parkway Drive could run the city of Santa Fe.

Park and Nebel [pdf] are the researchers who discovered the POPS effect which was corroborated in part by computer simulations done at MIT by McGuire[pdf] and Dietrich[pdf].

I estimate we will see the results of these experiments some time between March and May of the coming year. I have my fingers crossed.

The New Mexican article has a great review of Dr. Bussard's life. You should go and read the whole thing.

Here is a tribute I wrote to Dr. Bussard. It has lots of links to the science of the Bussard reactor.