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Conundrum

Wed Mar 25 2015, 05:48AM

Registered Member #96 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061

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

Wolfram

Wed Mar 25 2015, 08:17AM

Registered Member #33 Joined: Sat Feb 04 2006, 01:31PM
Location: Norway
Posts: 971

Aside from the fact that every single part of the idea seems completely crazy and impractical, how would 99Mo and 40K generate positrons when both are predominantly beta minus emitters? There's so much speculation and wild guesses here that this borders on pseudoscience

Conundrum

Wed Mar 25 2015, 08:51AM

Registered Member #96 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061

Um.. 99m2Tc is actually a beta emitter (180+ KeV)

Also 40K does have a positron emission mode (0.01% of the time IIRC) and the current consensus is that antimatter catalyzed fusion may be practical under certain conditions such as very high pressure and intermediate temperature.

also see

Wolfram

Wed Mar 25 2015, 04:25PM

Registered Member #33 Joined: Sat Feb 04 2006, 01:31PM
Location: Norway
Posts: 971

Do you have a source for that information? I've never heard of positron emission from 99mTc before, and the data I've found on the web seems to support this. The only other mention of 99m2Tc on the web is a comment on theregister.co.uk that seems to have been written by you.

Linking an unreviewed wikipedia article written by yourself doesn't really help much.

dexter

Wed Mar 25 2015, 07:30PM

Registered Member #42796 Joined: Mon Jan 13 2014, 06:34PM
Location:
Posts: 195

what tesla has in common with this?

anyway regardless of how much this looks like Star Trek tech (in my words bullshit tech) something that use nuclear reactions will output high energy radiation that require a lot of shielding which is impractical for a vehicle

BigBad

Wed Mar 25 2015, 10:34PM

Registered Member #2529 Joined: Thu Dec 10 2009, 02:43AM
Location:
Posts: 600

The rule of thumb with any project is that you can expect one almost impossible or very difficult thing to turn out to be possible, but the list you've got there is so long that there is no probability of success.

Conundrum

Wed Mar 25 2015, 11:35PM

Registered Member #96 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061

Double checking this it seems to mention oxygen-18 and there is a gamma emission from 99m2Tc in the 180KeV range.

It is possible that the system could work with other positron sources however, and we now know that under certain conditions metastable isotopes can emit bursts of radiation which could appear to be B+ gamma pairs on certain instruments.

Also worth mentioning that under certain conditions the sticking issue of muons (aka u mesons) to alphas can in fact be resolved very simply using ironically very simple technology invented in 1902.
It wasn't tried because tubes were intentionally redesigned to screen out such rays because they fogged up the film and caused radiation syndrome in machine operators/researchers, perhaps Cool-X could be sitting on a potential gold mine if they repurposed their setup?

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