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Bubble Fusion Results Replicated by 4 Institutions
Trackster writes ""TROY, N.Y. - 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." Here's another link in case EVWorld gets burned."
I can hold off on buying the exercise-elliptical-stepper charger for my Zaurus?
Are we allowed to get excited at the possibility of a new form of energy, or do we still have maintain an air of scepticism at this unorthodox fusion method? Also does anyone know why they used D + D fusion reaction rather than the more common D + T reaction? One of the quotes suggests that it is possible, and being more energetically favourable (from what I remember), I wonder why it wasn't used.
I missed that crappy movie.
What the article doesn't mention is how useful this might be. It appears that they have devised a reliable way to trigger a fusion reaction, but is it feasible to use it for electrical generation, for example? I understand that the major problem with fusion reactor research is that they have always consumed more energy than they have produced, making them quite useless for actually generating energy. But since they are not inducing the reaction with high-powered electromagnets as has been done in the past, would this enable the possibility of a true fusion generator?
I will be the first to admit that I didn't understand the finer details in that article, but the premise is rather exciting.... in another 10 or 20 years. It is a great breakthrough, however, whether or not you understand the science...
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
We hear, every so often, that "nuclear fusion has occurred", and nothing ever comes of it. It either can't be replicated or is impractical for power generation.
Would anyone care to enlighten me as to when we'll see anything come of this promising technology, and when people will stop pussyfooting around and just increase the scale a little bit?
Flying Jesus!
Is it just me, or is bubble fusion a really cool concept?
This is the kind of thing real progress comes from! Not the big nasty brute force machines we've been trying to coax a usable fusion reactor out of for decades, but a clever application of the laws of physics to get tiny pockets of fusion at much more sane average temperatures and pressures. Temperatures we can work with without having to contain them in giant magnetic toruses, temperatures we don't need petawatt lasers to generate for a fraction of a second.
I can see this development panning out, but even if it doesn't I'm still in awe of it's elegance.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Desktop nuclear fission, eh? Sure the power generation is less than parity, but a portable neutron generating device could be used for so many things - medical scans, security scans, neutron vision goggles...
and of course
Shark-mounted Neutron Cannon.
It's actually the better link. Not sure why the submitter chose to relegate it to second-class status.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
At first I thought you said "giant magnetic trousers".
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
200 Hz pulses of neutrons and tuned ultrasound create cavities and grow bubbles in deuterated acetone which grow from 60 nanometers to 6 millimeters. At this point, they implode within nanoseconds, reaching estimated temperatures of 10^7 Celcius/Kelvin and 10^9 atmospheres (sea level) and releasing energy: tritium (hence fusion), light photons (sonoluminescence), gamma rays, and more neutrons. "Because the bubbles grow to such a relatively large size before they implode, their contraction causes extreme temperatures and pressures comparable to those found in the interiors of stars." "In future versions of the experiment, the tritium produced might then be used as a fuel to drive energy-producing reactions in which it fuses with deuterium."
I was curious to see everyone's response to this (well, everyone that has a better idea of the implications of this working, that is) and i'm surprised there aren't more posts!
Is this a sign that we've stopped caring about "cold fusion"? Is the fact that this field has had a less-than-credible past hurt this discovery? Is this a discovery? Have movies like Chain Reaction spoiled us into thinking that this is a pipe dream?
Somebody help me out.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
From the Business Week article, it looks like they're making stronger vessels to hold the liquids at very high pressures:
"Since ordinary sonoluminescence delivers so much energy at pressures of only one or two atmospheres," he says, "you could hope that at 1,000 atmospheres, you'd be in fusion territory -- if the temperature also scaled up. But that's a really big 'if."'
I'm also surprised that this isn't on the main page of Slashdot. When reading the previous article on the discovery, there was a lot of "let's wait for confirmation" messages. Now we have it and it seems an appropriate time to get excited.
The coolest part about all of this is that it's relatively cheap, with the possibility of inexpensive and clean energy. The scary aspect that I haven't seen mentioned is that it could be an good source of neutrons used to enrich uranium and make weapons-grade material.
I'm too lazy to even try an order of magnitude estimate for this, but I wonder how much the symmetry of the collapsing bubble is distorted by the gravitational pressure gradient. A few nanoseconds isn't much time to develop distortions, but 6 mm is damn big for this sort of thing. When the bubbles collapse back to nanometer scales, any deviation from spherical symmetry will become quite apparent. The question is whether gravity is a significant contributor to such imperfections when compared to thermal fluctuations, momentum from the incident neutrons, and the like. If so, conducting the reaction in microgravity could get the system that much closer to break-even (not that I expect they'll be close anytime soon, but it's fun to think about).
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
I do not know about Princeton but the JET Experiment reached Breakeven in 1997. Spot-on about the neutron production issues though.
They're using a liquid called "deuterated acetone" as the liquid. From the science daily article:
The acetone contains a form of hydrogen called deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, which contains one proton and one neutron in its nucleus. Normal hydrogen contains only one proton in its nucleus.
Wouldn't it be funny if the sheer acreage of acetone tank required to produce a watt o power makes it less economical than covering that same area with solar panels?
Eat at Joe's.
I remember something like this being the subject of a Keanu Reeves science fiction movie. I think some terrorists hijacked the thing and ended up destroying half of the city.
I think the movie was called Chain Reaction.
"When God kisses Satan and the Incarnations applaud." "Death is dead. Long live Death!"
N/T
My coffee's too weak.
I was at a conference of the ASA a year or so ago, and those in the know at the conference stuck around in one particular room for a particular series of talks.
First the internal review committe from Oak Ridge talked about how they couldn't find much evidence that Taleyarkhan and his group had actually produced bubble fusion -- this was pretty deadly in a scientific sense, since their OWN lab was very critical of their work. But then Taleyarkhan talked, and gave careful and convincing evidence to the contrary: His group actually HAD produced bubble fusion. It was a pretty tense afternoon, though everyone seemed to be of relatively good cheer. Fun times!
I hope Taleyarkhan and his group actually do figure a way to produce and control -- and maybe harness the energies produced -- bubble fusion; since I'm in physical acoustics, this means more jobs for me to go into!
Here's an extremely lazy way to estimate it. Assuming the bubble collapse time is 100 ns (article only says "Within nanoseconds"), the top of the bubble will fall an extra 5x10^-8 microns during collapse, using the .5*g*t^2 formula. Even if I'm off by many orders of magnitude (and I'm guessing I overestimated), this is quite insignificant compared to the .06 micron size of the bubble at its smallest.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Are you really, really sure about that? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Did anyone see Chain Reaction? Sound waves help create fusion that looks likes bubbles in water?
Anyone? Anyone?
Did he patent it yet? Hurry Keanu, hurry!
Bubble-wrap fusion!
I work at Oak Ridge National Lab (although not in physics and I don't know these folks). A physics person I spoke to that has some inside perspective seems to think that it is legit.
However, he doesn't think there are any ideas around about how it could be applied to exctract any positive energy budget at this stage (let alone any practical ones). Unfortunately.
We can just hope that more people paying attention to it will increase the likelihood that some bright person will get some ideas in that direction.
/..sig file not found - permission denied.
. . .out of Legos.
Goddamned kneejerk skeptic. RTFA - the phenomena has been replicated. There's definately something there.
Now, any speculation about any purported wonderous applicaions of that phenomena could be treated as vaporware.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The DD reaction requries ~35 keV to initiate, while the DT requires only ~4 keV -- an order of magnitude less energy. So why did they use DD?
I worked with Purdue's bubble fusion system for a bit. We used DD because of the near impossiblility of getting tritiated-acetone. The deuterium in the reaction comes from the acetone in which all hydrogen atoms have been replaced by deuterium atom. The generated heat is hot enough to break down the acetone an start the reaction.
Deuterated acetone is hard to come by but possible. But try to find tritiated acetone on the market and you will come up empty.
If someone were to make tritiated acetone, mix it with the deuterated acetone and put it into the reactor, the neutron yeild would certainly increase.
#include "humorous_pop_culture_reference.h"
Hi all,
well I have a PhD in plasma physics (experimental) from MIT where I worked at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (www.psfc.mit.edu). I've also done my best over the years to keep an eye on the literature on picosecond sonoluminescence and related stuff (I've chatted in person with Seth Putterman at UCLA who is a top person in the area...) The thing that keeps one from dismissing this out of hand is the highly non-equilibrium state of the bubble implosion. It seems convincing from the work done to date that an incredible concentration of energy from the acoustic spherical wave in the liquid occurs in the bubble implosion. The light emission is attributed to the localized concentration of energy and resulting local temperature spike (though chemical processes play a role that was underestimated in the beginning of the research). This energy concentration might be enough for a very small number of low-cross section processes to take place including fusion reactions. That said, my understanding is that neutron measurements are an absolute nightmare of calibration and low signal-to-noise problems. (Not my field but this is what I gather from people I've talked to.) This is what kept Pons and Fleischmann (sp?) going for so long and what may be at issue here. Phys Rev. E is a good, reputable journal though and these folks are going the standard, peer-reviewed route and not trying to get patents, etc. and making everyone doubt their work... It may be for real... Stay tuned.
I heard about this a few years ago in popular (science? mecahnics?).
- 136.html
They called it sonolumenecense or something like that. It didn't produce fusion at the time but they thought it might be a possibility
Good to know some cool wacky experiments come to fruition.
From 1998 check out http://www.ans.org/pubs/journals/fst/vol/34-2-128
They could always use the neutrons to breed Plutonium for a fission reactor... ...just kidding.