Realistic Antiproton Reactor (mike?)

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2003-01-21 09:30am

How about using a fusion reactor that can fusion not only hydrogen, but the helium, carbon and maybe even oxygen products it generates?

ClaysGhost · Post by **ClaysGhost** » 2003-01-21 10:08am

Admiral Valdemar wrote:A/M reactors are only seen for one real future purpose and that's powering rockets to extreme subluminal velocities with less fuel and the greatest of efficiencies. You still have the containment, radiation and threat of something wearing out, but by the time we have A/M rockets I doubt half of that will be as problematic. That or we find something else nearly as effective, simple fusion for instance.

I think with an A/M rocket your radiation problems are significantly reduced because most of the radiation is leaving the ship as exhaust. The containment problem remains.

ClaysGhost · Post by **ClaysGhost** » 2003-01-21 10:17am

Arrow Mk84 wrote:How about using a fusion reactor that can fusion not only hydrogen, but the helium, carbon and maybe even oxygen products it generates?

Large stars do this when they run out of accessible hydrogen in the core. These reactions require higher temperatures, the primary candidate (the carbon-carbon cycle) requiring a temperature of over 15 million K. Other reactions involving heavier elements can require up to 100 million K. The carbon-carbon cycle produces about three times more energy than the proton-proton (hydrogen to helium) cycle, but I don't think the increase is sufficient to justify the extra mass of the propellants. Carbon has twelve times the mass of hydrogen.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2003-01-21 10:26am

Actually, what I was envisioning would start off with hydrogen fusion, and as creates a sufficient mass of helium, it would fuse it and then fusion carbon once enough has been created. Your making these elements in the reactor anyway, so you might as well use them.

ClaysGhost · Post by **ClaysGhost** » 2003-01-21 10:39am

Yes, that could extend your fuel supply, but the reactions would be more and more difficult to maintain as the required temperature increased.

Slartibartfast · Post by **Slartibartfast** » 2003-01-21 12:33pm

The Silence and I wrote:
What if the antimatter loses containment? The whole place would go off in a brilliant white pulse of light.
And loss of plasma containment in a fusion reactor is just gonna go unnoticed???

No, but I think it would merely melt the reactor, or the part where the plasma is contained, not make all fusionable materials go boom. You only need to contain the plasma that is a result of the materials being currently fused. With an antimatter reactor, you need to contain all the material IN STORAGE, where a loss of containment means releasing ALL the energy from the reactor at once (huge antimatter blast) instead of the tiny fractions needed to produce energy.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-01-21 01:07pm

Arrow, thats entirely useless really. Getting hydrogen to fuse is hard enough, the heavier the element the more energy you need to fuse them. Once you go past beryllium you hit a dead end.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2003-01-21 09:10pm

I know its difficult to get hydrogen to fuse right now, but that doesn't mean I can try to figure out where the technology will head.

BTW, what are the required temperatures for H-H fusion and for He-He fusion?

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-01-21 09:16pm

H-H requires about 2 million degrees. He-He I'm not sure about. Helium 3 fusion might be less, or require less energy in compared to energy out. Let me whip out IITS and get back to you in five

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-01-21 09:35pm

bugger all, i cant find good info of He3 fusion

but from what i can find, He3 is fuesed with Deuterium. Its somewhat harder, but outputs less radiation.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-01-21 09:51pm

yanno, this actually got me thinking. IEC reactors are cheap and seem to have great potential (fusion being achievable with little input power compared to tokamaks and other ICs). Now, heres a few ideas;

what if during the compression stage of the IEC chambers cycle you also exherted strong electromagnetic fields on the ions to crunch them together?

also, since i've been looking into particle accelerators lately and intend to build one, what if you made a spherical accelerator (the IEC is already an accelerator but merely a single stage). Now, if you have a multistage chamber it could operate like a particle accelerator, accelerating the ions inward and continuously ramping up their energies.

Perhaps you could combine both of those, so that as the multistage completes the first compression you also add external magnetic confinement to compress the ions even further?

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2003-01-21 10:03pm

You just went plaid.

Anyway, I see where you going with it. You would need some serious technological advancement to pull it off, but seems plausable. The big question would be how much more input energy do you need.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-01-21 10:25pm

i dont see why youd need any technology we dont have now. IEC fusion has been pulled off already (http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/MainPage/ftisite1.htm). My idea only combines present IEC chambers with LinAc confinement magnets and LinAc multicavitation.

Technically, what I described is a oscillating SpherAc, a particle accelerator that pushes its beam towards the center then as they repel it pushes them towards the exterior, over and over. You could build a LinAc like this, no problem.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2003-01-21 10:29pm

Ok, now I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy (and not that way, you sick perverts!). Where do we build this thing?

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-01-21 10:56pm

At university when you get into the plasma physics course.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-01-22 12:17am

quick render of a possible test version of the multicavity IEC chamber;

http://www.geocities.com/psygnisfive/Pr ... DMIECA.jpg

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-01-22 12:24am

explanation of the image: the bright spot in the center is the high temperature impact region. the grids/grates that you see along the length of the chamber are the push-pull grids/cavities. they accelerate the fusion fuel towards the center to the impact region. the things around the impact region are high power confinement magnets which force the incoming protons together to give them lots of pressure. The magnets would quickly pulse just as the protons reach the impact region.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2003-01-22 07:56am

Damn, the good ol' "Page is not available message".

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-01-22 07:57am

bah. add a question mark or something.

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2003-01-22 06:11pm

One idea for a M/AM reactor might centre on the fission principle; in this case, antiprotons reacting with monatomic hydrogen. The proton and antiproton annihilate, leaving an electron impelled at high velocity. You'd still have the radiation hazards and stress on the reaction chamber, but it might be an easier scheme for deriving electrical power or rocket propulsion than M/AM fusion with equal particle or atomic pairs.

PeZook · Post by **PeZook** » 2003-01-23 03:28am

AdmiralKanos wrote:
kojikun wrote:couldnt you flood the chamber with gas and then let the AM be released in the center so that it is away from the walls, surrounded by much more normal matter, and the radiation would be smothered by the gas (like xrays through open air)?
Which means that the gas will be heated up by the radiation, which in turn causes all of those problems I mentioned. And again, the rate of the reaction is important; at high reaction rates, the gas will expand explosively, becoming both more difficult to contain and less likely to react with the antimatter. And now you've got to harvest this gas for energy; how are you going to do that? You don't just magically go "hot gas -> electricity".

Maybe you could surround the "gas chamber" with water, so that the reaction heats the gas, the gas gives off heat to the water, boiling it, and steam runs turbines hooked up to generators?
That, of course, assuming you can contain the superheated gas...or maybe replace the gas with water, so that the reaction itself would heat it?