IXS Tesla

Conundrum, Wed Mar 25 2015, 05:48AM

Hi all.

Had some late night/early morning inspiration for a SSTO vehicle.

Seems that a lot of the problems with existing technology are volatile fuels (ie rubber/nitrous) as unfortunately
the most energy dense compounds are also the most unstable and hard to store safely.

The basic idea here is to use existing technologies in a novel way as most of them already work and peer reviewed
literature suggests that superconductivity can occur well above room temperature in strong coherent electromagnetic fields.
(see max planck institute published papers)

It is useful to note that in the last 5 years condensed matter technology has moved on a lot and to make a compound
that can withstand >8000K without flying apart or quenching is actually not outlandish.
Once this works in the lab it would just be a matter of engineering to build a working prototype and simply use water as both a reaction mass and deuterium/hydrogen source.

As for the needed antimatter several sources exist notably 11C/13N/15O/18F but it could be possible to extract useful energy from 40K if it could somehow be induced into the desired B+ state while at ultralow temperatures conducive to superconductivity so that the positrons can be guided into the reaction chamber(s) allowing the boosted fusion process to take place.

The main advantages with this approach are that all of the problems with conventional "hot" fusion can be overcome as the conditions within the crystal can be tightly controlled so that the reaction generates tokamak level power output (multiple GW) yet is not much bigger than a kitchen table and is also "fail safe" if the antimatter and fuel are cut off.

The crystal itself is likely to be a composite, probably multilayer diamond/HTSC so that the infrared radiation can be continuously fed back into the system and any sudden changes in current also fed back so that it stays stable.
I had some ideas to use YBCO/Tb as this is possibly one formula which will work due to resonances between the Cu-O planes and the terbium and it would also need to be isotopically controlled due to favorable geometry within the system.
In this case it appears from earlier literature that heavy metal atoms do in fact dampen charge density waves (CDWs) however if there is too much damping it simply breaks down in short order so the system would be critically damped and stable within a specified range of IR wavelength , magnetic field strength and temperature.

A lot of the problems with controlling antimatter flow are resolved as the positrons can be induced to pair up and thus become a lot easier to handle; this is analogous to electron pairing in a Type 1 superconductor and in fact the system would be coherent if conditions mentioned earlier are met.
The antimatter conduit(s) could be made of similar materials to the LHC coils ie Nb3Ti or MgB2 / Y123 for a Gen 2 system.

The reaction output in this case would be a super energized helium/deuterium plasma in the megaKelvin range similar to the sort of deuterium plasma beam you might get from an IEC fusor but substantially higher energy.
This would be best used directly to get a specific impulse equivalent to about two Saturn V's or fed through a series of magnetic accelerators similar to the VASIMR if higher velocities are needed for interplanetary travel.

I have some schematics here for the core if anyone is interested.

Also found possibly relevant as discusses positron Cooper pairs.

EDIT: Corrected really obvious error on my part, for some reason my reference source material was incorrect.

-A