Fusion Using Sonic Compression

The Only Druid writes "Scientists have confirmed the use of sonic waves to create the necessary compression in plasma to achieve nuclear fusion, far more effectively and cheaply than any other method. Val Kilmer was unavailable for comment."

Comments

Keep your shirts on

[Lonesome Squash]

TFA (a press release about the pending publication) is woefully short of the kind of info we want to see. It appears to be a nice confirmation of earlier claims of cavitation-induced fusion that were disputed due to imprecise measuring technique. I couldn't find anything about it on Phys Rev E yet.

In any event, it's not Mr. Fusion. The amount of actual fusion is tiny, and well below any commercially or societally interesting level.

Re:Interesting

[Jesrad]

It's not supernatural. Just because no theory explains it fully does not mean it's not real. We still don't know how superconductivity works exactly, for example.

Re:Did it release more energy than it absorbed?

[j_cavera]

Worked on this project for a bit. Yes, it does release more energy that it takes to start -- in theory. In the lab, you need about 100 watts of power to get a few milliwatts of heat. Bear in mind that this technology is in its infancy and may scale upward to the net-gain level. BUT due to temperature constraints in the apparatus (it likes cold), it will be difficult to get this up to power-generation level.

- Jim

And can it release it usefully?

[Engineer-Poet]

Adding heat to a lukewarm bath of deuterated acetone is one thing. Even making bubbles in a truly hot fluid (such as water in a high-pressure boiler) is quite another. The bubble phenomenon appears to depend on there being a large enthalpy and density difference between the liquid and vapor phases; as you get toward the critical temperature and pressure, this difference decreases until it finally disappears. Supercritical = no more bubbles.

High temperatures are important. You can't run an efficient heat engine off a small temperature difference; the lower the input temperature, the more of the total energy has to be discarded as waste heat. If you can't convert enough of your fusion energy to work, you can't power your ultrasonics and thus cannot even run your plant on its own output power.

If you could form bubbles of deuterium vapor in a bath of liquid metal it might be something else, but that's a bit beyond what they're doing here.

Re:And can it release it usefully?

[WhiplashII]

What you say is true, but less true is deep space. Out beyond Jupiter or so, there is very little energy available. Everything is very low temperature, and radiation cooling very quickly gets you to extremely cold temperatures (40 K is reasonable, as I remember).

Something like this could work as a Mr. Fusion for deep space probes - it sounds like a perfect match. Deep Space probes typically don't even need that much power!

Val Kilmer?

[Kosi]

What has he got to do with physics?

Re:Val Kilmer?

[bhima]

It's a reference to a movie he was in: "The Saint".

The Saint

[roseblood]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120053/

As a young orphan, a boy[Val Kilmer] refuses to accept the name given him by priests and instead chooses to take on the name of Simon Templar after the Saint of magic. Speed ahead and the young boy is now a master thief in bidding wars with countries for his services. Using his skills of master disguise, he eludes all pursuers as he assumes names associated with the various Saints. In this role after stealing from a Russian industrialist, the industrialist hires The Saint to steal a formula for cold fusion being developed by a young female scientist. Cold fusion is said to permit a nation to heat its citizens with only a few gallons of water. However, on this case The Saint falls in love with the scientist placing him in a quandary of fulfilling his professional obligations or staying with the innocent young scientist. When she becomes threatened by the Russian Mafia, he has no choice but to go ahead with his job. However, she follows him to Moscow, setting off a chase across the City and through their sewers.

I think you mean...

[centauri]

Keanu Reeves.

Re:I think you mean...

[stromthurman]

Nope, they mean Val Kilmer.

Re:Interesting

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Psuedoscience is inherently not reproducible in carefully controlled, well designed experiments. This certainly seems to be reproducible, hence is not psuedoscience.

APS as arbiter of truth

[bill_mcgonigle]

I couldn't find anything about it on Phys Rev E yet.

Yeah, well Bob Park shat all over it when the experiment was first reported, as he's want to do for anything not involving big-budget tokamaks.

There's a difference between being professionally skeptical and being openly hostile towards unexpected developments in science. I'm afraid APS/Park fall on the side of being high-priests of high-energy. A scientist must be both completely open minded and rigorously skeptical - those two qualities are not exclusive and if you lack one you're not really in it for the science, you're in it for your agenda.

In this case he impuned the veracity of the ORNL group and was wrong about it.