Demon One!
Drink deep, or taste not, the Plasma Spring! – Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly”
Success! On my first run ever, tonight at 8:15 p.m., I created confined violet plasma in my beer can reactor (pic above). This is the first major milestone on the path to fusion. I christened my first reactor Demon I. The name has significance which I will explain later in this post.
The setup is shown below. Click or double tap on the photo to get a larger version:
I took some photos with my ipad but they showed up kind of funky. Below is my proof of a confined plasma. What I mean by that is the plasma was confined in the spherical core of the reactor, a requirement for this type of device. The photo is quite fuzzy but you can see the wires of the spherical core. The plasma ball was plain as day to the naked eye, with an electron stream out of the ball to the top of the chamber:
I took a pic of the chamber just prior to the first run:
My current meter was DOA and I didn’t set up a voltage measurement, but I can approximate that the voltage was in the 5000-6000 volt range based on where the variable transformer was set. The vacuum chamber pressure varied between 100 and 130 millitorr. As I increased the voltage, the pressure rose slightly due to outgassing. As I increased toward the max voltage, I could see that the grid was disintegrating. I ended the run and took a photo of the hot grid below:
A beer can has a polymer lining to keep the beer from reacting with the metal can. This turned out to be no problem for this run. As a matter of fact at the end of the run I did not notice any degradation of the can lining at all. Can’t say the same for the reactor core, it melted big time:
I thought the wire was stainless steel but it appears to be copper which has a lower melting point. That would explain why I had a core meltdown at such a low voltage…
Why call it Demon I? A couple of reasons. The first is to inspire an antithetical view to a device that on the surface seems really cool. I could call it inspirational positive names such as Star Chlid or New Dawn, but the reality is that all technology is used for good and evil, inspiration and disdain, freedom and oppression. I think Demon I is really cool simply because this is what I was able to create in my garage. On the other hand, that doesn’t make it inherently good. Nor is any “cool” technology inherently good. It isn’t inherently evil either. It is what it is. Think about the Manhattan Project, the program to develop the atomic bomb in WW II. For the scientists involved it was the opportunity of a lifetime to make something that had never been done before. We all know the results. Were the scientists evil? No, they were just doing what they do, and the technology is not good or evil, it is simply a revelation of the way nature works. The Manhattan Project is a stark example that can be extended to all technology, period.
The second reason is I wrote a book called Forty Demons…
😉
ANYWAY, drink deep of the plasma spring!
Posted in Nuclear Fusion Reactor by Mark with comments disabled.