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Fusion In Sonoluminescence (Again)?
srhuston writes "According to a story at the NY Times (first born child req'd, yadda yadda), 'Scientists are again claiming they have made a Sun in a jar, offering perhaps a revolutionary energy source, and this time even some skeptics find the evidence intriguing enough to call for a closer look.' This has been covered here before (First, second, third) but it looks like they claim that the latest round of experiments, using better detectors, 'offer more convincing data that the phenomenon is real'." The scientists involved come from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Russian Academy of Science; here's their press release.
So, the problem with extracting energy from this is still sustainability combined with total output right? The amount of energy invested in the system will have to be exceeded by the energy produced or else it is for naught. The things about traditional plasma fusion is that energy output is extensive, but the reaction cannot be sustained. Bubble fusion appears to be sustainable, but likely does not produce significant caloric heat......
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This is news? We've had canned sunshine in our gift shops here in Florida for years!
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Sigmentation fault - core dumped
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Well, at least this finally fills that ugly hole on Wednesday in the Slashdot weekly schedule:
Monday: Patch Windows
Tuesday: Stop SCO's latest plan
Wednesday: Invent Fusion
Thursday: Patch Linux
Friday: Watch LoTR while patching Windows
Since they got Fusion out of the way early today, I think I have a little time to go bash Infinium Labs some more. Tally ho!
Without understanding all the physics here, I think there may be something to this. One of the reasons chemists are kind of intrigued with sonochemistry (chemistry facilitated by sound) is that ultrasound generates "bubbles" (for lack of a better word) where the local temperatures can reach into the thousands of degrees of Celsius. You can do some really amazing chemical syntheses using ultrasound all because of the extremely high local temperatures generated. The same idea extends to using microwave ovens for chemistry. You can do lots of reactions in a microwave because of the intense and neatly condensed amount of heat generated.
So, there may really be something to this. It would be great if it did work out.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
...people standing around said jar start dieing.
I've done a bunch of work in sonoluminescence. It's deeply cool, don't get me wrong. But the highest temperature we were able to measure was about an order of magnitude too low for fusion. Even if our measuring had an error factor of two or three (not impossible, since we had to dope the water to get high enough brightness for using a spectrometer), I'm far from convinced.
I've had this sig for three days.
... they squeezed tiny gas bubbles in the liquid so quickly and violently that temperatures reached millions of degrees and some of the hydrogen atoms in the solvent molecules fused, producing a flash of light and energy.
Please note that this is *NOT* cold fusion.
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here's a link from a local paper.
An interesting quote from the article:"Willy Moss has been trying to reach that brass ring for a long time, and he's had way more money than Taleyarkhan and way more facilities," George said. "And when Taleyarkhan said he had neutrons, (Moss) sort of chimed in and said, 'No, no you don't,' because he was hard on the trail trying to get there first."
Seems there is a bit of anonymity here. In the defense of the researcher(s):The evidence now is "far more compelling," he said. "This time around, before publication took place, I deliberately involved a series of highly acclaimed physicists to come down to the lab and review the experimental setup and the way we were obtaining data and look at the experimental data."
After receiving positive reviews from them, he took the findings to the management of Oak Ridge, which conducted its own internal review, making the forthcoming publication "perhaps the most peer-reviewed paper in the history of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory," Taleyarkhan said.
$discovery is really cool. Once again, $scienceFictionAuthor was a visionary when he wrote about this concept in $book. I hope that we can come up with some practical applications using $discovery soon.
$wittySig
Sonoluminescence: an Introduction
Single Bubble Sonoluminescence HOWTO
Actually after a while the walls of a tokamak have to be changed because neutrons makes them radioactive on the long run.
So yes this would produce radioactive material too, but a material less nasty and lesser material than a fission reaction.
Iraq: war to save the U
Our setup is presumably somewhat different than ours, but here's the summary of the five-minute do-it-your-self sonoluminescence kit:
Take a spherical flask, around 100ml or so. Bigger will mean lower frequencies but higher amplitudes needed. Fill the flask with water from the tap, up until the mensicus is just at the neck of the flask (that is, the water body is as close to spherical as possible). Attach on opposite sides of the flask two speakers, and somewhere else (we just put it between the two speakers, 90 degrees from each, but it doesn't really matter) a microphone.
Hook up a frequency generator to your speakers. Hook up your mic to a 'scope. You'll see the frequency being generated being picked up, slightly muffled and distorted, by the microphone. Tune your frequency until you get resonance; it'll be really, really obvious as the peaks of the mic output become much sharper than the input frequency. The actual frequency depends greatly on the water volume, and is very sensitive to temperature; for our particular setup 48kHz - 52kHz seems about right.
Turn off the light. Allow your eyes about 10 minutes to adjust. With this setup, you'll have light about as bright as a 5th-magnitude star. Any stray light at all will limit your detection. Slowly pump up the amplitude of your input. As the amplitude goes up, resonance frequency changes slightly, so tune as needed. The total amplitude needed is not very high, but it's probably going to be in the top half of a non-amplified signal generator's range.
The gas in the bubble, in this case, is a combination of (some) water vapor and (mostly) outgassed dissolved gasses. That's why we used tap water, above. Bottled water has much less dissolved gasses, so will be much dimmer. Also, water that sits there outgasses, so if you don't change your water it'll get dimmer over time. But we can exploit the fact that it's this added gas that glows, if we want.
Drill a very small hole (seven mil, for us) in the exact bottom of your glass flask. Attach a capilary of the same ID, or a bit more. Attach capilary to a gas canister, and input a low flow rate of gas while running the experiment as above. The idea is to have a near-constant flow of extremely small gas bubbles. If the bubbles are too big, nothing will happen at all; the temperature doesn't get high enough. If there are too many bubbles, you disturb resonance something awful. If the bubbles don't pass through the center, they'll be ignored. But if you get it just right, you'll get a nice burst of light (0th or 1st magnitude) when each bubble goes through, appearing as a constant point of light to the naked eye.
Argon works really nicely for this. Nitrogen works too. You don't want to use anything that dissolves too easily, because it will saturate the water; too much gas outgassing results in bubbles too big to glow. And you'll have to chance the water quite often, because everything will dissolve too much eventually (although helium seems to either dissolve less or just outgas from the top of the flask more quickly).
I presume what they're using in this experiment is hydrogen/deuterium gas, either fed in ordissolved in the water.
Since I should be studying for a midterm, I'll cut off my tutorial now, but feel free to ask more!
I've had this sig for three days.
An order of magnitude too low is also within merely one order of magnitude of success. What actual quantity was in the range? Degrees Kelvin? Joules:m^3? Order of *decimal* magnitude, logarithmic, other? In a statistically distributed energy system, an average miss by 0.1% might mask hits in 1% of the material, balanced by farther misses in the other 99%. And if you were really only 33% off, considering a 2-3x error margin, might their experiment not have been more precise in efficiency, and in measurement, offering a hit at the threshold?
When fusion is industrialized, I expect that some processes will far exceed the fusion thresholds, for their own specific reasons. The threshold is not a bullseye, but rather a welcoming shore of a virgin territory. News of our drawing ever nearer is tantalizing, but not discouraging, as we prepare to colonize the territory.
--
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The paper's going to be in Physics Review E, not Physics Review Letters, which is where your link led. Check out the first two sentences of the article:
Physical Review E has announced the publication of an article by a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the Russian Academy of Science (RAS) stating that they have replicated and extended previous experimental results that indicated the occurrence of nuclear fusion using a novel approach for plasma confinement.
This approach, called bubble fusion, and the new experimental results are being published in an extensively peer-reviewed article titled "Additional Evidence of Nuclear Emissions During Acoustic Cavitation," which is scheduled to be posted on Physical Review E's Web site and published in its journal this month.
I did a search at the Physics Review E site, but it's not there yet.
Nevertheless, like you, I feel that the arrival of a press release before the paper appears is something of a red flag - Especially in this particular subfield of physics.
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
Maybe I haven't looked hard enough
It seems you didn't look at the press release at all. The sub-title of which being "Physical Review E publishes paper on fusion experiment conducted with upgraded measurement system". So, in case you have trouble interpreting that, what they are saying is that this has been peer reviewed, and it will be published, in a respectable journal.
Desktop fusion is no big deal, after all - the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor (
Here's a link ) does this.
The fusor operates by accelerating deuterons in a static electrical field towards a central locus ('juicy nugat center')(grin).
The trick to a fusor is that there's a lot of possible factors to setting one up:
among other factors. more info is at a homebrew club of amateur experimentors
I've been tempted to try this, but my wife has overruled all discussion of it. She has something against hot neutron sources in the house when we have 3 small kids. Alas. (Especially since this thing emits the particles in 3 dimensions, so shielding would be significant.)
SO: MY QUESTION FOR THE EXPERIMENTERS: WHAT IS THE TOTAL ENERGY (JOULES) PUT INTO THIS EXPERIMENT VS. HOW MUCH EMITTED? Is this going to be another wildly inefficient methodology, or does it have advantages over Fusor or Tocamak designs?
-- Kevin J. Rice
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Unfortunately, it's getting the reaction to generate more energy than it consumes, is the problem.
Actually, they solved that problem in the 50's. It's controlling that reaction that is rather more difficult...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Good News:
Piping hot coffee or soup in seconds.
Bad News:
Everything metal in kitchen becomes mildly radioactive from neutron bombardment.
Good News:
Rats, mice, cockroaches hate the sound of a sonofusor in operation, emptying cities of vermin.
Bad News:
Sound also drives dogs into a frenzy of mindless leg-humping. Except Boston Terriers, whose tightly sutured little skulls explode.
Good News:
Leads to development of ultra-efficient (but low thrust) rocket motor that uses water as a reaction mass.
Bad News:
All water outside of Mars orbit turn out to be owned by Capella OmniVolatile GMBH, who charge a heavy fee, payable in increasingly rare Boston Terriers.
Stefan Jones
Firstly, is it something where they could have a whole vat of these bubbles being created and destroyed with sonic waves constantly and through this vat you could have water pipes that would create steam and drive a turbine?
This would not generate any extra energy. It is simply using energy to cause vibrations that heat up water and generate steam. The change in phase causes a high enough pressure to cause a turbine to generate electricity. In each of those steps, energy is wasted (it's the law!).
What the article is talking about is supplying enough energy to facilitate a reaction that could cause two hydrogen atoms to form a helium atom. When this occurs, the mass of the helium atom is slightly less than the sum of the two hydrogen masses. Since thermodynamics says the mass had to go somewhere, we account for the loss with an increase in energy (a la E=mc^2). The amount of energy released by this reaction is theoretically substantially greater than the energy used to force the two atoms together. At least, that's the gist of it.
Don't confuse fusion with free energy,however. Fusion comes at a price, and it's the coversion of mass into heat that leaves you with two less hydrogens and one more helium, so there still is a fuel that is 'burned'. Luckily, our favorite proton-electron duo is the most abundant element in the universe.