Conversation

Notices

1. cjd (cjd@pkteerium.xyz)'s status on Friday, 10-Jan-2025 23:45:07 JST cjd
   Recently I've been thinking a bit about hydrogen fusion.
   
   The pressure required to make H2 spontaneously fuse is around 250 billion atm, which is enough that there isn't really any material that you can build a suitable piston or cylinder out of.
   
   A recent approach has been to try to force a liquid (in this case a hot metal) to compress a bubble of hydrogen plasma in the hope that as it collapses, the inertia of the liquid will create a shockwave that far surpasses the pressure of the vessel, reaching the target pressure at the center.
   
   In this design, they center the plasma by spinning the entire apparatus in order to drive the heavier liquid to the edge by centrifugal force - not an ideal requirement for an engine. In addition, the number of independent pistons is annoying compared to a single reciprocating piston with a number of equal length tubes between it and the reaction vessel.
   
   There's something I find quite amusing about the notion that humans may in fact make it to the stars, but with EM drives* that are powered by what are glorified internal combustion engines. Nothing will define the aesthetic of future asteroid miners better than a spaceship that sounds like a Camaro.
   
   * Contrary to popular belief, the science behind "flying saucer" tech is pretty much sorted and it's just an engineering problem that remains.
   • xianc78 repeated this.
   • cjd (cjd@pkteerium.xyz)'s status on Monday, 13-Jan-2025 09:06:55 JST cjd

     in reply to
     Thoughts on fusion:
     
     Compression based -> I'm not convinced, lets say you can make a shockwave that amplifies the pressure by 1000x, now you just need 250 MILLION atmospheres instead of 250 billion.
     
     I'm not generally a fan of doing things "the right way", usually the right way is the way everyone has already researched and proved unfeasible. I want to cheat, I want to attack the problem in a way that nobody is thinking about.
     
     Here's a brief summary of where I'm thinking there might be cheat codes:
     
     1. Chemical reaction that triggers fusion -> Take for example some kind of hydrogenated nitroglycerine, when the molecule - reorganizes - you can imagine it creating enough localized energy to fuse the hydrogen atoms.
     
     Ironically when you start down this road, you end up bumping into all of the Stanley Meyer water car stuff. If you pay close attention to his videos, you'll notice that he never really made enough hydrogen to run an engine. An obvious point is that the tubes carrying the hydrogen are hilariously under-sized. If there was ever anything to his claims (which I still find dubious), it is that he found a way to make hydrogen burn much more violently than is justified by the chemical energy. There are other people who claimed to have figured this out as well, and they speak about three distinct types of hydrogen combustion, only one of which will work in an engine. If you take them at their word that they got the car to run, but refuse to believe that they understood at all what was happening, the most likely explanation is that they somehow managed to make some of that hydrogen go nuclear.
     
     2. A catalyst. Perhaps there's some kind of metal that squeezes hydrogen into close proximity in a lattice or something and then a little bit of energy is all it takes to fuse it.
     
     Interestingly this is precisely what was supposed to be happening in the Pons and Fleischmann cold fusion experiment. To quote ChatGPT: "Palladium has a unique property: it can absorb large amounts of hydrogen or deuterium into its lattice structure"
     
     3. I was going to say modifications on a Farnsworth fusor, but these things have been built so many times, I'm pretty sure every idea has already been tried, so I don't think there are any cheat codes to be found there.
     
     4. From the work of Mike McCulloch on Quantized Inertia, trying to see if there's a way to go around the rules.
     
     ---
     
     I think #4 is probably the best direct path, a lot of work has been done on #2 and cold fusion remains at best a neat party trick. That said, the Stanley Meyer / HHO stuff is like a rock in my shoe, it's hard to stop thinking about it...
     xianc78 likes this.