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Force Field. No, Really
tqft points out news of "a working force field, using plasma. Now to scale the sucker up." Here's the
Brookhaven press release.
I can think of so many uses for this.
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Finally, a solution to the "Dad, he keeps touching me!" dilemma.
There was a guy down the street from me who was in a force field. Can't remember his name but he had a black and white striped shirt, white face paint and he didn't speak that much.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
are some borg implants so I can walk through the force field unaffected.
I can think of so many uses for this.
;)
Like keeping PHBs out of the server room?
My journal has hot
or is all its blocking at the moment air? then again 14k kelvin might keep us out.
Finally a decent way to protect your *nix server
from physical contact!
Yipee!
*snicker*
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
I asked the guy how he did it, but he won't tell me.
Hasn't anyone explained to him the wonders of open force?
-JDF
Yes, but can it stop plasma torps? what about phasers?? :-)
Just read here
Brookhaven Lab and Argonne Lab Scientists Invent a Plasma Valve
UPTON, NY â" Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory have received U.S. patent number 6,528,948 for a device that shuts off airflow into a vacuum about one million times faster than mechanical valves or shutters that are currently in use. The new device, called a plasma valve, was developed through research funded by DOEâ(TM)s Office of Basic Energy Sciences in the Office of Science.
In synchrotron light sources, other particle accelerators, and various other scientific instruments, where plasma valves can be put to use, a vacuum allows very high-energy electron beams to circulate in rings for hours. These electron beams interact with magnetic fields to generate x-rays, ultraviolet light, and other forms of radiation that travel unimpeded through beam lines used for experiments. When the vacuum is breached, air moves in with great force, the electron beam loses confinement, and its energy is deposited on vacuum walls. The faster the breach can be contained, the less damage there will be to the ring, beam lines, and the experiments that use those beam lines.
The need for a fast valve at Argonneâ(TM)s Advanced Photon Source led Argonne engineers to explore the potential use of plasma arcs previously developed for electron welding guns. The Argonne team â" Sushil Sharma, John Noonan, Elbio Rotela, and Ali Khounsary â" joined Ady Hershcovitch from Brookhaven to develop the plasma valve.
Hershcovitch explained the advantages of the plasma valve: "Unlike traditional valves, a plasma valve has no moving parts, does not require much maintenance, and establishes a vacuum-air separation much faster. Also, it is completely nondestructive. In contrast, existing ultra-fast valves and shutters can cause damage to machinery when triggered."
When activated, the plasma valve is composed of an ionized gas, or a gas with charged particles confined by electric and magnetic fields, that fills an airtight aperture. When the plasma reaches certain temperature and density parameters, it separates atmospheric pressure from a vacuum, which must be devoid of pressure.
When a vacuum is breached, a plasma arc is ignited in less than one nanosecond inside the plasma valve. The valve's outer structure is comprised of a hollow, water-cooled copper cylinder located between three cathodes and a hollow anode ring at the opposite end of the cylinder.
At 15,000 degrees Celsius (27,032 degrees Fahrenheit), the plasma valve is about 50 times hotter than room temperature when measured in degrees Kelvin. This intense heat makes the ionized atoms and molecules move around and collide with air molecules so rapidly that the ions block any air molecules that might pass through the plasma valve.
Researchers from around the world study a wide variety of materials at light sources such as the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne and the National Synchrotron Light Source at
Brookhaven. For example, they use their bright beams of light to examine the minute details of computer chips to make more efficient computers, decipher the structures of viruses to work on developing new pharmaceuticals, investigate magnetic materials to make better recording devices, and study corrosion to develop new methods for its prevention.
A. Rightmann
They use the word plasma so many times in the last sentence of the first link, that for some strange reason (closely related to my sense of humor, I'm sure), I'm reminded of Monty Python and Spam:
A much faster, more complex version of a previously introduced "spam window" (see New Scientist, 12 April 2003), the spam valve is the latest example of novel uses of spam for particle-beam applications; other recent ones include spam acceleration of antimatter (Update 634), a spam lens (Update 508), and spam deflection of high-energy beams (Update 540).
Niiieeeeeeeeeeeeee!
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Room temperature is around 290 Kelvin (about 25 degrees Celsius, or 77 Fahrenheit). Remember, 0 Kelvin is absolute zero - -273.something degrees C.
15,000 / 50 = 300 kelvin
300 kelvin = 26.85 C = 80.33 F
[Temperature Conversion Page]
So, about 50 times room temp.
SPAM
15,000 over 50 is 300.
300 Kelvin is about 26 Celcius, 80 Fahrenheit.
Does that help?
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
It's not as bad as you think - 300K = 27C = about 77F.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I love the idea, and the science around it, but the article sucks! No pics, diagrams or any actual detail on the way the thing works. I'm sick of this kind of 'it works because of herbs!' reporting; it's way too simple for any inquiring mind and because of that it's non-informative.
:)
A shame, 'cause I'd be interested in the practical implementation of this valve system. And I want pretty movies and/or pictures, of course
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
To keep all of the vampires and blood drive workers* from getting too anxious, the plasma this article refers to is not a component of blood (medical jargon). This other plasma (physics jargon) is matter that has been charged with so much energy it begins exhibiting characteristics of a liquid rather than a gas.
*After seeing some of the workers running our corporate guilt-a-thon, I suspect this may be redundant.
Since this does a great job at separating air, and a vacuum, this has great applications in space.
Think launch bays that really can be opened up to have a shuttle pass though, and leave the air inside the bay intact.
Yes, this idea has a lot of promise.
3000 dead over past 2 years, still no free Palestinians, still
Silly Americans... still converting to Fahrenheit. ;)
2) The plasma valve is INSIDE a copper container.
If you think this is a "force field" then you might also be interested in the "ray gun" in your television tube.
An interesting story nonetheless, spoiled only by the fatuous ignorance of the submitter and editor.
Because I brought my DINOSAUR! Who EATS force field dogs!
i know you are trying to be funny, but realistically, the amount of energy a high-temperature "thing" contains can be a lot less than you think.
for example, some ions trapped by the earth's magnetic field goes up to some 14 MILLION kelvins (notice it's hotter than anywhere on, around, or inside the sun). However, as there are maybe one or two such high-temperature particles per cubic centimeter, you will still freeze to death standing (erm, floating) in the middle of it.
just a pedantic monday morning, i guess. I'll stop now.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Extended Warranty? How can I lose!
First, its degrees only when it is Fahrenheit or Centigrade, which are not absolute units. Second, its Kelvins, damn it! (at least when it is more than 1K). People have no problem with Joules, Newtons, Pascals etc which are all people's names, why is Kelvins so different??
[I haven't done any physics after high school, so if I'm wrong correct me.]
This thing is for use in sci-tech research only, for creating air tight vacums. It can't be used to protect / encase eevryday objects. For example, I quote:
At 15,000 degrees Celsius (27,032 degrees Fahrenheit), the plasma valve is about 50 times hotter than room temperature when measured in degrees Kelvin. This intense heat makes the ionized atoms and molecules move around and collide with air molecules so rapidly that the ions block any air molecules that might pass through the plasma valve.
In short, don't expect this force field to be in use at your neighborhood brig / jail anytime soon :) A really cool advancement though.
At 15,000 degrees Celsius (27,032 degrees Fahrenheit), the plasma valve is about 50 times hotter than room temperature when measured in degrees Kelvin.
I want to say something about this, but the sentence makes my brain hurt, and not in a good way.
So... converting temperatures to Kelvin makes them lower? It may be that I'm too far removed from my math and science classes, but... well, come to think of it, I never learned it that way.
Sheesh, they didn't even say "in Kelvins." "Degrees Kelvin" indeed... amateurs...
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
If you tried this in say a jail cell, you would fairly quickly cook the occupant. ... if the occupant touched the field, his finger would cease to exist...
Still, i'll take the plasma field over the 6'5" grinning black man with the jar of vaseline in his left hand and 10" in his right.
It's supposed to be short. That's the whole point of the online AIP: short summaries of articles.
Why the poster linked to it instead of to a full published article, I don't know. Perhaps a full published writeup hasn't been made yet. Perhaps the poster thought that short sound bites are all that the /. crowd has attention for.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
um 300 * 50 =15,000 not 1500
S
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
If you could make a huge-scale forcefield that wouldn't repel matter but allow it to rest on it you could make ... TRANSPARENT AIRCRAFT!
The military would probably be interested, but I'm more into the idea of see-through 747s- just think of the view!
I suppose you'd still have to have most of the aircraft solid, unless force fields can act as wings etc for aerodynamic purposes (IANAP), but you'd still end up with the equivalent of glass-bottomed boats, except far cooler.
graspee
Umm...already done?
Untima® 150 Plasma Welding System.
Flamebait
Serious inquiries only.
Brookhaven National Labs is awsome man. I interned there one summer and forcefields are the least of their toys. The place is out in the middle of Long Island NY and looks almost totally harmless from the outside. Inside they have all the latest and greatest science tools, everything from nuclear reactors to partical accelators. 10 Years ago they figured out how to do 3D medical imaging like you see in science fiction movies and methods to do surgury with radiation beams. If your ever out that way sign up for the tour, its enlightening.
BOFH, My model for being a sysadmin :)
Now, the high voltage shock might give you pause before touching it again though...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I suppose next we'll be hearing about a new sort of sci-fi device called a "laser". Perhaps this "laser" can be used with the "force field" to sculpt pictures of world leaders onto the face of the moon...
The parent is absolutely correct (at least in the content :-P). It's a volume of very hot gas enclosed in an electromagnetic field. Nothing spectacular about this, and still requires an enclosing apparatus (rather than, say, generating a forcefield around the apparatus).
This is an advance in technology, for sure - it's a very fast valve. But there's no physics breakthrough involved. It's just an application of an old theory to an old problem, made possible by advances in technological expertise and practice. It's a clever hack but it's not a force field.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Maxwell's Demon is a physics problem the is the basis of quantum mechanics. Simply, suppose you had a tank of air that was divided in 2 by a tiny split, with a gate. At the gate is a "demon" who lets high energy particle in on side, and low-energy particles in the other.
Theoretically, by expending no energy save that to open and close the gate (plus whatever overhead the Demon requires) you could thwart the laws of physics. Soon one side of the tank would be "cold" and the other "hot" even if they both started off at the same temperature.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Correction:
15,000 / 50 = 300
50 is completely reasonable here...
I'm not as sure about this, but I found a link in Google to something that looks reputable... some plasmas exist at temparatures as low as 1,500 degrees. According to this [www.co.san-bernardino.ca.us] water turns to plasma at 1,500 degrees - but unspecified Kelvin, Celsius, or Fahrenheit. If it's Fahrenheit (a farely safe assumption that it's either F or K because it's US,) then 1,500 F = 1088.7055555556 Kelvin, so it's still within reason. If it's Celsius, then 1,500 C = 1773.15 Kelvins, still not so bad...
"We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream."
Schmendrick the Magician
... does it make that cool "Bzzzzt" sound when you walk into it?
Miko O'Sullivan
Well, considering the air molecules are still colliding with *something*, namely the force field, the air friction would still be there...
Blasters possibly, I really have no opinion on that, but lightsabers are still a bit off. Lightsabres are cohesive, that is, if you move the handle, the blade moves as though it were completly solid. It is unaffected by, or at least overcomes, the inertial forces that would cause it to bend (think of swinging a rubber lightsaber). It is not clear that a force field would allow this to happen. (Although it is possible) The biger problem with lightsabers, is that they are completly powered at the base of the beam, while the "force fields" span a gap between two (or more) points. We have, at this time, no way to terminate the lightsaber blade.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Except this wall has a very small, negligable mass.
Thus, you could also make a balloon with extra lifting capasity just by vacuuming out the inside of a field. It could also fly closer to space than any other balloon, since it has a vacuume(essentially 0 density).
Or you could have containment for mass-sensitive matter (antimatter, etc.)
How about a see-through wall with zero heat transfer by contact?
How about a wall that cannot melt, because there is nothing there to melt? We may finally have something we can melt diamond/carbon in
Sometimes you have to think outside the ridgid plasma cube
- Sig
Or how about we don't convert away from an absolute temperature scale before dividing things all over the place?
If you convert to C first, you've just assigned an arbitrary zero to the scale and cut off about 90% of room temp, but only about 2% of the force field temp, so of course when you then go dividing by 50 it doesn't work out.
Remember kiddies: arbitrary scales are all well and good for addition and subtraction, but don't go messing around with multiplication and division; you'll end up a pregnant murderer who supports terrorists.
How about not being a moron? Would you like an analogous operation? Let's say you're doing .1 kph over the speed limit (which happens to be, say, 30kph) and a guy zooms past you at 60kph. Would it be fair to say he's driving 300 times faster than you are?
Celsius includes an arbitrary constant. If you multiply a celsius measurement, you're multiplying the constant and creating a new scale.
Not that it really makes much sense to say "x is y times hotter than z" in the first place, but at least there are things that scale roughly linearly with Kelvins. Nothing scales linearly with degrees Celsius.
In fact, that's an even better example - I don't think you can follow this one, but other readers might be able to hack it. PV=nRT. So if I have a quantity of gas at -1C, and it occupies 1L of space, and I heat it to 1C - WTF! OMG! I HAVE CREATED FUCKING NEGATIVE SPACE! I AM THE MASTER OF SPACE AND TIME!
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
The body can stand immense positive pressure, but nasty things happen with very low pressures. The boiling points for things like water (which your flesh has in abundance) come way down. Check out the water phase diagram sometime. Interesting things happen at sufficiently low pressures, like room temperature boiling, sublimation, etc that are beyond the normal intuitive understanding of everyday materials.
Heck, large quantities of youths get smallish (~1 square inch) regions of flesh exposed to near vacuum conditions all the time with nothing worse than a red welt to show for it.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
And it IS Awesome!
I worked on the pre-cursor to the plasma valve at BNL, the Vaunted "Plasma Window" (ooooh, ahhh)
The thing really is incredible, and yes, I accepted the project because I read the description, and went..."Holy C*ap! That is just like the shuttle bay!" And it is, well...if the shuttle bay were ~4-6mm in diameter =)
And about the 15K Kelvin thing, yes plasmas do get that hot, but lets get real here, the thing is tiny...I bet the lights above your head get just as hot in the middle of their plasmas.
Anyway, the project I worked on was very robust and partially scaleable, just would require a boatload of power. It was very "loud" but not "noisy" as we could put very sensitive equipment right next to it and there would be no interference (you physics types should get this) and when you take a collimated beam of light...in one case a green laser, it will shine clear through it with next to no loss, which is a huge improvement over any other method of separating Atmosphere from Vacuum.
Mind you, this would be only the first stage in a series of differential pumping to get down to UHVacuum.
Gratz to Ady, he is one helluv a guy!
-Chris
Let me get this right.. you want a picture of a vacuum surrounded by air. Now that sounds like a nice picture.
I've got a good picture of it here.
I had found this to be an interesting read, but I would need to see it to beleive it. ...David Swenson of 3M Corporation describes an anomaly where workers encountered a strange "invisible wall" in the area under a fast-moving sheet of electrically charged polypropelene film in a factory. ...
h tml
rest of arcticle can be found here
http://www.amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.
Your comment is quite silly. The entire sentence, from the article, is:
At 15,000 degrees Celsius (27,032 degrees Fahrenheit), the plasma valve is about 50 times hotter than room temperature when measured in degrees Kelvin.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."