Tonight I really experienced the power of the coil power supply. Whoa.

I’ve been working to increase the coil current from ~1.2kA to ~2.5kA.

Previously I discovered the coil discharge path had more DC resistance than expected.

I rewound the Polywell coils with 16 gauge wire (previously 18 gauge).

The 16 gauge DC resistance is 144 mΩ compared to 227 mΩ for 18 gauge wire.

I beefed up other wires on the coil discharge path (4 gauge):

Lets test the wiring with the dummy coil:

I took the power supply up to 100V… a small test charge…

When I fired, the noise from the coil made me flinch. It was never that loud before.

Lets turn up the power!

300V for second test.

When I fired the coil there was lightning! HOLY CRAP.  Look what happened:

The coil fucking wrapped itself around the transformer (electromagnetic forming). Then it discharged to ground:

So I haven’t measured it yet, but I think we are getting more current to the coils.

Electron gun operational:

I got these high voltage supplies made for CRTs:

I still need to play around to get it focused, but a great start!

I’ve been running shots on the Polywell yesterday and today.

Just got my deepest potential well yet: 43 Volts.

10KV, 10mA on electron gun. 420V through coils. 8.5 millitorr air:

Be sure to check out the conditions I ran yesterday and today. Each shot has an oscilloscope photo with experimental parameters in caption.

1 year,  7 months  and 8 days ago I learned of the copper coil Polywell that Joe Khachan and his team built.

I decided to repeat Joe’s experiment. Although challenging it seemed possible to achieve. I dubbed this endeavor the Sydney Experiment.

It took far longer than I expected to fabricate all the necessary parts for the experiment.

Today with great pleasure I ran the Sydney Experiment. Here we see what appears to be electron confinement:

This acquisition shows the floating potential of the langmuir probe.

This run was done with air plasma at 10 millitorr :

The electron gun was running  10KvDC @ 6.5mA:

The coil power supply was charged to ~ 400VDC:

This is just a first run. Now begins the actual experimentation and data gathering.

I do believe this is the WORLD’S FIRST AMATEUR POLYWELL!!!

The plasma during the run:

Last night my shop mate Stuart hosted a cryogenic cocktail party using his cryo-freezer and my liquid nitrogen.

The cryofreezer goes down to -120˚ C, cold enough to freeze liquor! We had vodka, bourbon, and gin ice cubes:

Ben made a silicon cast of a drinking glass to cast an ice glass:

We used the liquid nitrogen to make flash ice cream. Delicious:

I made white russian ice cream:

I have put the superconducting magnet into a persistent state!!!!!

Power supplies off, magnet still going!

Details to follow.

UPDATE:

OK. Here it is. The units are in raw volts coming from the magnetometer and the current sensing resistor (0.008 ohms). The red is the current going into the superconducting coil, the white is the magnetic field. You can see that the current drops off, but the magnetic field persists. WIN!!!!

The magnetic field gradually falls off over the course of an hour.

This is the setup:

SC coil in the dewar:

Here is the schematic:

It was all controlled manually by switching the power supplies on and off.

Read all about it:

The definitive piece is by Quinn Norton – No Sleep ‘Til Fusion. This article is amazing – heartfelt and accurate. Quinn was there the night of the definitive fusion run. She even helped run the reactor. It was a night on the cusp. So exciting.

The same day Matthew Danzico from the BBC published Extreme DIY: Building a homemade nuclear reactor in NYC. This article took the story viral… it’s all over now!

CNN did a web writeup: Man builds web pages by day and nuclear fusion reactors by night.

CNN TV: Nuclear fusion the ‘Holy Grail’ of green energy?

CNN live interview.

My friend Olivia Koski was on this story from the start: Amateur Fusioneer Dreams of Clean Energy.

Discovery News: HOMEMADE NUCLEAR REACTOR BUILT IN NYC.

Gawker wins best of snark: The Gucci Employee Who Built a Nuclear Reactor in Brooklyn. “Artisanal nuclear fusion”. Pretty funny comments too.

Best comical artwork goes to racked.com: Gucci Web Developer Building a Nuclear Reactor in Brooklyn.

Most ridiculous headline goes to NYPOST: New Yorker found with nuclear reactor in Brooklyn warehouse. NYPOST also wins worst gross factual error: They state that I am building a fission reactor, which is incorrect… it’s fusion.

Worst comments go to Fox News: Gucci Designer Builds Nuclear Reactor in Brooklyn Warehouse.

We were covered by AOL, Yahoo! News, AP, France 5, Inside Edition, Huffington Post, Reddit, Digg, Hacker News, Slashdot, and a bazillion other outlets. I had reporters camping out at old apartments, calling my relatives, showing up at the lab. We got a visit from the NYFD and NYPD. Absolutely fucking nutz. The world went bonkers for this story.

Just as I planned…. mwahahahahaha!

Now everybody forget all about this so I can get back to work!  ;)

With the vacuum pump working again, I assembled the fusor and attempted a fusion run last night. It was a day frought with challenges, but in the end the bubble meter saw 4 bubbles in 2 hours and 40 minutes:

This shows beyond a doubt that we have fused the atom. During previous attempts we only produced a single bubble… which suggests fusion, but does not rule out a cosmic ray.

Science Journalist Quinn Norton was at the lab writing a story for Gizmodo. She witnessed and documented the fusion run:

Previously we were having problems with transient voltages spikes or EMFs crashing the data acquisition (DAQ) card. Today was a big test for the new transient voltage suppression system . It FAILED big time. But I learned something in the process.

I began by intentionally creating an unstable plasma to test the transient voltage system.  This crashed the DAQ every time.

Next I disconnected all wires to the DAQ to determine if the interference is coming through the wires or the air:

Without computer control I needed some way to manually adjust  the MFC. I hacked together a quick voltage divider using a 2KΩ potentiometer and a 9V battery:

This proved to work very well.

To control the high voltage from a distance I used the emergency stop button:

This also worked very well. At this point the reactor is completely under manual control. No computer necessary. Which will turn out to be a good thing.

So now we can test the DAQ with no physical connection to the reactor.

Surprisingly, I was able to crash the DAQ every time, even with no wires connected to it!

Quinn noticed the USB hub flickering during the plasma sparks and suggested it may be the failure point. I removed it, and indeed the system seemed less vulnerable to crashing:

At this point the DAQ seems to remain running in the face of sparking plasmas. Good.

Next I tried connecting one channel to the DAQ… a digital output channel to turn the high voltage on and off. I created a duty cycle function in labview to make it easy to bake out the chamber without melting the fusor grid. This is what it looks like running:

Next I bake out the chamber for an hour using a deuterium atmosphere @ 10 mtorr. The high voltage power supply is set to it’s maximum: 30Kv @ 10mA and the duty cycle is set to 75% @ ~ 0.09 hertz.

At first the computer controlled bake out was running smoothly. About 15 minutes in I get a computer crash. Restart. It runs for about 7 minutes and crashes. Try again. 5 minutes and it crashes. The crashes in increase frequency until I am getting nowhere.

At the point I switch the system over to full manual control and begin the metered fusion run. A fresh bubble detector was unboxed and activated.

(so fresh and so clean)

For the main fusion trial the deuterium atmosphere was at 10 mtorr, high voltage set to it’s maximum: 30Kv @ 10mA. The procedure was to run the system at full power until the plamsa became unstable and started sparking. This instability seems to correspond to the grid becoming red hot, so the plasma instability may be due to thermionic emission.

The bubble detector was activated for 2 hours and 40 minutes. The plasma was running for some unknown fraction of that time. 4 bubbles were detected.

Challenges remain for controlling this wily beast with a computer.

I had the Glassman power supply  maxed out, and the deuterium pressure at ~9 millitorr. The plasma was borderline unstable due to low pressure. The focus of the plasma was maximal. There was a sharp uptick in activity from the geiger counter. The limiting factor was the grid kept heating up and glowing red. I had to cool it off to repeat each trial.

This is how it makes me feel:

Here it is with the color levels adjusted so you can see more:

This is really really exciting.

First thing I learned is you need some gas in that chamber to start a plasma. I started at pressures around  1 e-6 torr and got nothing. What you really need is pressures above 1 e-3 torr. My gauge doesn’t work in this range, so I was flying blind.

I had to install a valve to leak air into the chamber to keep the pressure where I needed it:

Just playing with this device for 10 minutes gave me more of an intuition for plasma than most of the reading I’ve done on the topic.

I’m now one small step away from first fusion. FUCK YEA.