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The entire goal is to create heat to boil water to make steam and rotate turbine spinny bois
2100`s tech applied to an ancient Greek invention. Love it.
It's also how coal and fission plants work. Hydroelectric plants and wind turbines use the natural flow of water and air, respectively, to spin a turbine a bit more directly.
Yeah, there is basically three general ways to make electricity (AFAIK)... -Using natural occurring kinetic energy (wind, waves, dams, etc) -heat generation (coal, gas, nuclear, etc) -solar panels (mirror solar farms that are used to generate heat would not be in this catagory).
at a large scale yes but there are other effects that can generate electricity. Like thermocouples can generate electricity directly from heat with the Seebeck effect. There could be other ways to turn a entropy unbalance directly into electricity that we don't know.
Zero-Point-Energy FTW!
"Solar panels" should be in a much larger category of electrical power technology based on the accumulation of electrical charge in a solid material due to any number of effects, whether that be in response to a chemical reaction (electrochemical reaction), mechanical stress (piezoelectricity), electromagnetic radiation (photoelectric effect), temperature difference (thermoelectric effect), or any other effects I am forgetting. The majority of Solar panels being "Solar Photovoltaic" panels using the third method.
In other words, there are many more than three ways to make electricity.
Edit: After thinking about it more, honestly "Electromagnetic induction" should be considered a similar effect that "accumulates electrical charge in a solid material". This one effect would encapsulate all the other methods to make electricity that you listed (which kind of makes the whole list useless to begin with).
It would probably be more useful just to list all the different effects, like those I've listed above, that create "the accumulation of electrical charge". Which is all electricity is anyway.
All of that just to say, there are many more than three.
I think he's saying there are essentially three ways to create electricity for the grid.
Yeah, I mean, I can spin a bunch I wires around to make electricity, but that doesn't make it large enough scale or practical.
For comparison LPP Fusion is trying to use induction coils and photovoltaics.
Modern day turbines have as much to do with ancient greeks in the same way fords model t has to do with a gt 500.
Power plant turbines have auxilary systems like reduction gears
They have a lot more than reduction gears but I think you're missing the point. No shit the Greeks didn't invent a multi-stage axial turbine but I thought it was neat that essentially you can trace the concept all the way back to things like Hero's aeolipile.
I have similar thoughts around modern. Obviously many changes have been made over the years but the Greeks were definitely on the right track. I also like to reference the fact that steam boilers are where modern Engineering first got it's start. Steam is a very energetic substance...
It's the best way to do the thing. The potential gains come from the fact that the heat released by a kilogram of fusion fuel is about 10 million times more than the heat released by a chemical reaction, therefore you need 1/10,000,000nth the input fuel, which implies you can optimize for very low costs per kilowatt-hour. Even if we had a magic machine that could turn 100% of the heat energy released by a given reaction into electrical energy, we would still be better off if we focused on improving the heat generator rather than the heat to electricity converter, simply because the gains in the former case are a mere 2x, whereas the gains in the latter case are as high as 5,000,000x. Also, converting heat to electricity is an inherently lossy process, and the efficiency rates we are currently getting are already very good considering the physical laws at play.
I've been wondering lately, and I should probably read up on the subject - but.. inside the Earth we have a near limitless source of heat. I guess maybe better drilling technology might allow us to use that?
can't take it into space and geothermal is complex and in efficient in most places
can't take it into space
My garden hose begs to differ
Geothermal heating already exists in a lot of places at many different scales. But it requires somewhere that the heat is close to the surface, which usually means volcanically active areas, like Iceland.
Some applications just use the relative heat of underground glycol lines. In climates with large temperature differentials it’s a big deal to pull 15C from the ground and supplement if needed.
Yeah that works great for keeping buildings warm. But I don't think you can generate grid level power with it.
It’s geothermal heating cooling
Even if we had a magic machine that could turn 100% of the heat energy released by a given reaction into electrical energy,
If we had that then we've suddenly solved both our bothersome issue with global heating and the energy shortage all at once lol
The hot air that we want to cool down.
I don't think your analysis makes a lot of sense. You're presenting it as if the main issue is getting some amount of mass into the power plant, so using 10,000,000 times less fuel mass is somehow 10,000,000 times better. Realistically that's not really one of the big issues, what really matters is the cost of the fuel per kWh produced (including potential price rises due to depletion of the fuel in the earth) and the environmental impact.
If fusion turns out to be significantly cheaper than current methods, then yes, just put more fuel in the reactor rather than squeezing every bit of performance out of the turbines. But if the price is higher it might be worthwhile. Either way, the fuel mass reduction hardly matters.
Except if you are using rare fuels like tridium or helium 3 witch fusion reactors often are. The current plan is to harvest some neurons from the reaction to turn some deuterium into tridium.
I got a pot full of water and a stove, and a hat with a spinner on top. They should hire me.
To be fair, steam turbine systems are about the best form of converting heat to rotational energy we have, large systems are like 96% efficient. Steam enters at 2000psi and exits at just barely above atmospheric pressure, turning all that differential into rotational energy.
Do you mean 96% carnot efficient or 96% of energy put in gets converted to electricity efficient?
Using carnot efficiency isn't really helpful outside of some engineering design talks, makes it sound better than it actually is.
Doesn't the steam exit at below atmospheric pressure and then cobdense back into water at near 1atm?
It couldn't exit if it was below atmospheric since it passes through the condenser which operates at that pressure.
I used to work at a refinery as an instrumentation engineer, our hydrogen plant did double duty as both hydrogen production and steam production, as well as having the condensing unit on site for recondancing the atmospheric pressure steam after it had left all the pump equipment and power generation systems.
Okay. I'm currently doing a thermodynamics course and all the examples we have indicate that once the steam condenses in the cobdenser, the pressure inside drops extremely low.
In principle magnetohydrodynamics can do a better job of extracting energy from a hot plasma. The downstream gas from MHD can then be used to do the whole steam turbine thing.
so basically a sightly more advanced water wheel?
How can boiling water STILL be the method of choice for transfering heat to power? Its literally steam machine tech...
Because it’s very efficient at converting heat to mechanical energy via turbines
I mean, that part pretty much hasn't changed since Edison and Westinghouse. All thermal power plants are really just giant fuck-off steam engines.
Yep, a fusion reactor is really just a really complicated and elaborate steam engine.
This it’s straight out of science fiction
It's all science fiction until someone make it.
Case and point: Cellphones. Many thought that was a pipe dream and limited to the imaginations of people like the writers on Star Trek and yet by the late 90's we had widespread usage, and today their capabilities go far beyond just a communication device.
There are hundreds of examples of stuff like that too, where it or a similar concept was conceived in science fiction before becoming a reality. Hell the word "robot" literally came from fiction before becoming a thing in reality.
"Case in point."
Man-made fusion generators exist, even net positive ones. The hurdle now is to engineer something that can scale.
Eh? Source? I don't thing any of them can operate long enough.
Similar to the sun
Will sound pedantic, but no. The Sun runs on the proton-proton chain, a reaction which has so small a cross-section (read: slow kinetics) that it hasn't even been measured on Earth. The only reason it adds up to any significant power is because of the Sun's sheer size (the core has a power density of ~280W/m3, less than what a human being generates through metabolism).
What these fusion reactors try to replicate on Earth is deuterium-tritium fusion, which doesn't take place in any star.
hence the word similar, right? it's fusion even if the elements are different.
It's a stretch, i.e. not even the same fundamental forces of Nature control them.
In proton-proton fusion, the rate controlling step is the decay of a diproton to a deuterium nucleus, which requires a (positive) beta decay turning one of the protons into a neutron, a positron and a neutrino. That decay process is mediated by the weak force, and as I mentioned before it is so slow its cross-section hasn't even been measured experimentally.
In deuterium-tritium fusion (or for that matter, also deuterium-deuterium or deuterium-helium 3) the fusion reaction is exclusively mediated by the strong force. That's why its cross-section is many orders of magnitude higher, and why a machine like ITER on Earth will pull power densities of 600 kW/m3 or three orders of magnitude higher than the Sun's core, even at a fraction of the density (the core of the Sun clocks in at 160 g/cm3, 20 times that of iron). Also for reference, those vintage 1970s pressurized light water fission reactors that everybody hates have a power density of 100,000 kW/m3.
So the process is really different, and also the products are: in particular, D-T fusion produces a lot of extremely energetic neutrons (~14 MeV, for reference fission neutrons are born at ~2 MeV) which blast on the vessel and carry most of the energy from the reaction, thus power generation is based on taking such neutron kinetic energy in the form of heat once it is dissipated on the lithium blanket surrounding the core. A blanket which you need anyway, because tritium is a radioactive substance that doesn't exist in Nature and you have to breed (all the fuss about Japan's government authorizing dumping stored tank water into the Pacific was due to a small amount, extremely diluted amount of tritium produced by neutron irradiation inside the Fukushima wreck).
The meme of Earth fusion being the same reaction going on in the stars is misleading at best.
Thanks for your detailed explanation, very interesting.
The idea of an ITER-like fusion ever being an economically viable method of generating electricity is an even worse meme, IMO.
Particularly when we've had perfectly economical methods of generating clean energy like Solar PV and nuclear fission for literally decades. (Although the economic viability of nuclear fission may be arguable when accounting for high capital costs and long-term waste management.)
The idea of an ITER-like fusion ever being an economically viable method of generating electricity is an even worse meme, IMO.
They go hand in hand. Whatever the intention, making D-T fusion appear as qualitatively different from fission or any other nuclear technology, in particular by falsely claiming that it is the same process that happens in stars, makes for good PR for the field. And that helps with securing funding, out of which you can make a career as a researcher. The latter is independen from the fact that these machines could eventually deliver any power to the grid. Or more to your point, that they'll be able to do it economically and without the problems that have plagued fission.
Particularly when we've had perfectly economical methods of generating clean energy like Solar PV and nuclear fission for literally decades.
Agreed. Solar PV and fission breeders are all we need to produce clean and plentiful power in the coming millenia, and they are miles away with respect to D-T fusion in terms of technological readiness level. They do have issues big enough to keep us busy (energy storage to counter seasonality and intermittency in the case of solar, high capital costs derived from safety overengineering in the case of fission) and that's where public research money should pour into, not the 60 billions or so that will be spent at ITER (Wendelstein 7-X is a different beast as it was an order of magnitude cheaper and faster to build, which I for one think is more in line with our actual priorities).
At least the waste from nuclear fission plants doesn't end up in the atmosphere like in the case of hydrocarbon combustion plants.
because tritium is a radioactive substance that doesn't exist in Nature
well not on earth but it gets generated in the atmosphere albeit very rarely, right?
Correct, as a trace isotope. I don't remember what's the natural generation mechanism by heart, but I bet it's spallation from either primary or secondary cosmic radiation on the upper atmosphere.
That's not going to help you fuel your fusion reactor though, it's impossibly too dilute and scarce. For ITER, tritium for firing tests is going to come from the rather meager source in CANDU reactors from Canada, which use heavy water as moderator and thus are subject to (rare) neutron capture of deuterium to tritium.
Even the elements are the same haha just different isotopes is all
This is beyond being pedantic lol. The goal is still DT fusion, ie hydrogen isotopes. Each of which has one proton. But I'm assuming you knew that... The cross sections for DT are just higher, but the physics are exactly the same - we're not talking about boron proton fusion here haha
the physics are exactly the same
That's the point: the physics are not the same, insofar as the weak force mediates the rate-controlling step in one case and it is completely immaterial in the other. That's why cross-sections are so impossibly wildly different.
If by "same physics" you mean nuclear reactions, then sure. But then you should also put natural radioactive decay and fission reactors in the same category of "little stars on Earth", which probably sounds misleading to the fusion crowd. Well, comparing D-T fusion to the reactions going on in the Sun's core sounds exactly like that to anyone that understands the difference.
Man, the physics ARE the same. We're using magnetic fields to increase number densities the same way that sun "uses" gravity to do the same. The reason we're using isotopes instead of protons is because we can select the fuel and we care about efficiency. DT fusion 100% also takes place in the sun btw
Well, comparing D-T fusion to the reactions going on in the Sun's core sounds exactly like that to anyone that understands the difference.
Lolol ok, man. What do I know? I only have a PhD in plasma physics and literally have modeled this reactor 👍. But if you don't think you were being pedantic then you're clearly right
Man, the physics ARE the same.
I know they are not, and I have already explained why. Would you care follow suit and explain to the passer-by why it is so?
We're using magnetic fields to increase number densities the same way that sun "uses" gravity to do the same.
Again, the physics are different, thus the kinetics are different, so the rates and conditions are completely incommensurate. For the Sun's core, it's ~280 W/m3 at a density of 160 g/cm3; for the D-T fusion reactor on Earth, it's 600 kW/m3 at a density of a few mg/m3 at most (i.e., a high vacuum). The magnetic field strengths we can sustain are absolutely puny in comparison to the Sun's gravitational well.
The reason we're using isotopes instead of protons is because we can select the fuel and we care about efficiency.
The reason is because we couldn't have chosen otherwise and have any chance of succeeding in producing a fusion reaction on this planet. This is obvious to anyone who's barely familiar with the concept of triple product.
DT fusion 100% also takes place in the sun
Would you mind providing a figure for the percentage of the Sun's output coming from D-T fusion?
Lolol ok, man. What do I know? I only have a PhD in plasma physics and literally have modeled this reactor
That's a fallacy of appeal to authority, and a very poor one in that, because I cannot check your credentials unless you provide your identity. So, bad signal. Also, you don't actually have to provide any credentials when you argue about objective topics. There's no authority in physics: if you can sustain your argument to anyone that is versed in the field, it can't matter less if you are a homeless person who happens to have read and understood the concepts in his spare time.
But if you don't think you were being pedantic then you're clearly right
Anybody that understands what we are discussing knows I'm right, although a lot of them insiders wouldn't mind propagating the popular meme that D-T fusion is akin to fusion in the stars. It's hype, and publicity helps with funding, and thus there's sadly a conflict of interests. The reason I'm writing these answers is to show the passer-by who isn't aware of these "subtleties" to go check them on his own, and then come back and compare with what I wrote. A service to the community, one might say.
But you seem to be quite dishonest and prone to resorting to fallacies, so I'm done here.
Isn’t deuterium quite a bit heavier than water?
No. Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen. So hydrogen plus an extra neutron. Water contains oxygen which is far far heavier than any isotope of hydrogen. What I'm guessing you're thinking of is "heavy water" - which is water (H2O) but the hydrogen isotope is deuterium. Oxygen still accounts for like 80% of the mass.
Small correction: the 7x will never actually produce energy, it has no generators. It is for research into fusion, in particular this style of reactor (stellarator) and plasma stability.
They never said that.
You are both correct. And you are both pedantic.
Is it a Tokamak?
I don't know anything about fusion, but a tokamak is a torus shaped chamber. This one looks different.
It's a stellarator. Very similar to a tokomak. Both are magnetic confinement reactors, just the magnetic fields have slightly (relatively speaking) different shapes :)
Also, economically reasonable! Can't wait. I hear they're just 20 years away!
Some kind of art, inside of a fusion reactor, distorted photo....not sure what I'm looking at here...
Stellarator type fusion reactor.
Basically tokamak is a chocolate glazed, and stellarator is a French cruller.
Edit:
Major radius = 18', 5.5 m, 138 timbits
Minor radius = 1'9", 0.53 m, 13.41 timbits
Ksp interstellar extend intensives
Radiators go brrrr
The twisted torus inside the reactor is carefully designed to swirl the plasma in a confining magnetic field.
Almost looks naturally designed with refractory metal scales
Hella rad stuff!
Almost looks naturally designed
the more sophisticated technology gets, the more biological it often seems... ?
Hopefully they didn't bury H.R. Giger is sweatpants, 'cuz his corpse just got a massive erection.
Ah. Huh. Well.
It's hard to tell what is and isn't a reflection. Do you know the size of it?
Oh he got the velcros.
Poppin' tags!
I’m gonna pop some tags
There are no reflections, just a wide-wide-angle lens. Think of it as a torus with a twist in it, like a Möbius strip.
What? No it's not, you're just an idiot. Nothing has a mirror finish in the photo, it makes no sense how anyone would think so.
Kiss your mother with that mouth?
Also to think each of the scales/panels are unique
Maybe if we confuse the plasma it will be less glitchy?
It is a Stellerator type fusion research device. The reason it looks like that is because it is attempting to address an issue with Tokamak fusion devices. With the Tokamak, you have magnetic coils wrapped around a D shaped donut. The problem with that is that your primary containment field coil is the same dimensions whether it is on the outside or the inside of the "donut". This means you have more densly packed coils on the inside or the small radius of the "donut" than you have on the major radius. This leads to inconsistant magnetic fields being created. The field is stronger/denser along the minor radius than along the major radius.
So, the Stellerator geometry was designed to try and make a device that has more uniform magnetic fields across the entire inside of the machine.
I work on DIII-D. A magnetic fusion experiment. I am a technician, not a scientist.
Lmao, at this point i think you could get away with calling yourself a scientist.
Pretty easy to pull that off on reddit!
Back off man, I'm a scientist!
Source: me I'm a scientist.
Thank you for your kindness. I prefer to point out my credentials on a post like this so no one assumes I know more than I do.
Batman's a scientist.
So why is ITER beeing built using the Tokamak design instead?
Because the goal of ITER is to use (thought to be) known science to attempt to get to the break even point, not to experiment with new fangled science (other than just increasing the radius). We (roughly) know how to build Tokamaks, we’ve been doing it for 70 years, just need to make them bigger now*.
* Unfortunately, energy gain only increases with radius1.3, while costs increase with radius3, or more. That makes increasing size kinda a crap way build these reactors. There’s an experiment getting started at MIT just now called the SPARC reactor that hopes to get net energy positive fusion within 5 years by increasing the magnetic field strength using modern high temperature superconductors. I think they have a very high chance of beating ITER to the punch. The useful thing here is that energy gain increases with the cube of magnetic field strength, while it appears that the costs shouldn’t really increase at all over past reactors.
Ok, I don't know who Beelseboob is, but cool nick. And accurate response. I would add that while Tokamak geometries have been around for 70+ years, Stellerator, not so much.
The bottom line is that we understand Tokamak much better than Stellerator. So if we are going to dump many tons of money into a machine to do more research, we should go with a design we know fairly well.
The Stellerators main claim to fame is getting past the magnetic instabilities caused by the Tokamak geometry. This has yet to be fully proven through decades of reasearch.
We understand Tokamak, and how all the various diagnostics work within that geometry, so if we are going to build a large scale machine to further the research being done, it should be done within a geometry that is well understood.
While none of the machines operating right now are intended to make power, except for a few start ups that are trying to commercialize fusion energy, they do provide valuable data for a future machine.
So, the big machines on Earth right now, Iter, DIII-D, Jet, KSTAR etc., are not intended to make electricity. They are for research to lay a foundation of understanding leading to a machine that will produce electricity.
Because while the Tokamak design is not the most efficient, it should be efficient enough the achieve the break even point once scaled up to ITER sized.
These projects take so long that you the technology and our knowledge evolve in the middle of their construction.
Amongst other things the geometry/simulations of a Stellarator are incredibly difficult to simulate, it's only as computers have gotten faster and faster that we've reach a point where these kinds of things become possible.
It's just a wide angle / fish eye lens photo.
The inside really is twisted up like that, just not quite as sharply as in this photo.
I believe all of the above. A very wide-angle (distorted) shot of the inside of a fusion reactor, creating an image that is much more art than documentary.
An extremely distorted photo of something cool taken with an insanely wide angle lense. Should I be more impressed by the cameras lense width or what im attempting to see?
Definitely what its distortedly capturing. Its a reactor which used a supercomputer to model magnetic fields to contain plasma more efficiently and with better stability in order to (hopefully) finally make fusion reactions economically viable. It has 50 electromagnets of what I would describe as "organic" shapes to achieve a twisted field in a tunnel for plasma to be contained. I am not doing the amount of crazy math and such justice so here's the wiki for it which contains a graphic of what the magnets and the field look like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X
The lens is just a super wide angle lens which is probably mass produced.
The Wendelstein 7-X (abbreviated W7-X) reactor is an experimental stellarator built in Greifswald, Germany, by the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), and completed in October 2015. Its purpose is to advance stellarator technology: though this experimental reactor will not produce electricity, it is used to evaluate the main components of a future fusion power plant; it was developed based on the predecessor Wendelstein 7-AS experimental reactor. As of 2015, the Wendelstein 7-X reactor is the largest stellarator device.
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The engineering that went into building it pushed whole industries to a new level of what’s possible. This thing is so batshit crazy complex it’s comical.
Oh I bet, some of the geometries involved alone I'm like "someone had a hell of a time making that mold/forging that part"
It looks like a luggage return on crack
This is pretty much what it is except instead of Samsonites you have Starjizz.
Is it possible to visit?
The picture isn’t from ITER though…
Thats ITER in France. The Wendelstein 7-X is in Greifswald, Germany.
What Sabine? You posted the same link twice.
I thought that's who you were referring to which is why I asked.
Thank you very much for the info!
What am I looking at?
The inside of a fusion reactor.
Iirc, it’s about as tall as a person. You might be able to stand up in there.
Here's an outside pic during construction:
Notice the people in blue suits walking on top.
I can’t really describe it, you’d be better off just looking up “Wendelstein 7-x”. That’ll help a lot.
It's basically a tokamak fusion reactor that's had it torus twisted. The idea is that by using some absolutely crazy fluid dynamics it will reduce the amount of heat and plasma that leaks through the magnetic field.
Smart people shit lolololol
Desktop version of /u/HedleyLamarrrr's link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator
[opt out] Beep Boop. Downvote to delete
My living room. /
My favorite stellarator
Looks like the enterprise slammed into a warbird out by the neutral zone
Fucking klingons!!!!!
Whenever I see cool science stuff like this I get so bored and disappointed with my average life.
Have you considered becoming a scientist/engineer? I understand it might not be realistic for everyone, but when I felt like this I went back to school and changed careers.
ITER isnt the future, this is.
Mind telling a fellow science enthusiastic about what ITER stands for? Haha
Oofers... Ah, I really hope we can achieve sustainable fusion reactions before mid-century, imo one of the only ways to survive the overpopulation and pollution
Would be nice if we also didn't overpopulate aswell.
My money's on General Fusion's design. Essentially a bubble fusion reactor but the bubble is enormous, and the void collapse is augmented by external force. Also by far the most direct way to capture all the energy of the reaction (except, like, neutrinos) and convert it directly to steam.
I had a look at this and my first thought was that there was no way in hell you could use mechanical slamming to make fusion happen. I then remembered that crazy Russian BARS design for making synthetic diamonds (which worked) and perhaps they're not as silly as they first seem.
Here is a nice video about it from the operator the Max Planck institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51Hji5NfkdA
Thulsa doom!!!!
Pleased Tell me this is available as High-Res somewhere. Would love that as a Desktop Background.
Ah so this is where Phineas and Ferb got the idea for Football X-7.
Which Mario Kart 8 track is this?
It looks like something has collapsed.
looks like deep dream
I'm incredibly disappointed that this isn't in a proper wallpaper resolution.
Best resolution on the web seems to be this one: http://www.bernhard-ludewig.de/media/cache/8b/69/8b699d46b3831dad23a86f1b8792708b.jpg
Not perfect at 1500x1000 px but a lot better
It's beautiful - it doesn't really look human, does it?
This looks like one of those stroke simulation pictures
Is it weird that I'm neither a nuclear physicist nor have I heard of the 7-X, yet I still recognized this image as the inside of a fusion reactor?
Have they got it working? Was it worth it?
I feel like this and the James Webb Telescope have been being built for the entirety of my life. I'm so excited to get to see both actually happening.
Bet those drawings are a bear.
Should I be able to tell what I'm looking at?
Thats looks torsioned
That's confusing I can't tell if it's like something that could fit on a desk or if it's like the size of q warehouse
When it blows up. Do the people around it get super powers?
What is amazing about this machine, is that it was really mainly designed in the 80 and early 90s. This was pre modern CAD and maths software, let alone computing powers we have.
Now anyone who has ever had the displeasure of having to work with any sort CAD that involves more than few splines of surfaces, can surely confess how delightful and easy it is to deal with when you have even slightly limited hardware and software. Hell these features find new and interesting ways to upset moderns programs, hardware, and designers. Now imagine doing it with hardware from 30-40 years ago. Pre-graphic interfaces, on small screens, and 3D rendering capabilities where polygons can be counted with fingers.
Yet they figured out all this shit, the major design features, the maths and tolerances to sufficient precision. Hell... Just our CNC capabilities improved greatly in the time it took to manufacture these components for assembly.
What is amazing about this machine, is that it was really mainly designed in the 80 and early 90s. This was pre modern CAD and maths software, let alone computing powers we have.
Why are you talking out of your ass? The whole thing started design in the late 90s and went into the late 00s, and of course modern CAD was used.
After all, the whole design is centered around the flux coils that needed modern supercomputers to calculate the shape of.
Especially given that the actual history of the stellarator design is even more impressive. Working prototypes were made as early as the 1950s! They just didn't perform as well as the tokamak designs from the same time.
They aren't manually moving around splines in SolidWorks bro... this is all parametric and the spline profiles are generated by code.
Yes. I know, not for the design itself. But you still need the manufacturing drawings and including manufacturing plans, attachments, fastening. This is not done by code, this is work done by hand fitted in to the system.
If in 80s you could generate designs including fasteners, attachments, and plans from just code, and have it just put it all out. We wouldn't be doing any CAD work and instead coding everything.
All those panels and fittings you see here, they had to be manufactured, specced out, installed.
So bro... There is a nightmarish amount of conventional design work here. Just like a ships hull, you can generate the shape with code, but you can't generate the individual bits with structural work, welding and machining needs, possible fittings for other parts and components.
Generating this shape is relative easy thing, you can do it in Blender with tools that it has natively. It is just NURBS math, which was mastered in the 50/60s. But manufacturing it is another task.
This guy engineers
Looks like a tokamac reactor that got damaged in shipping, but they put it on the self anyway
This photo is shit. Reactors are cool and this somehow doesn’t convey any of that.
Edit: spelling
If you wanna show me some engineering porn, make it so that I can see it. Don’t distort the image.
Just in case you are serious, this is really what sections of this reactor look like. The whole thing has repeating twisted sections and that's what you're looking at here. It's called a stellarator and the whole chamber has 5 symetric twists like this to help account for the drifting of atoms by creating a helical magnetic field and increasing the odds of successful fusion
The core of the avengers ship
Protomolecule vibes.
Star in a jar. Magnificent!
Dafuq??
Repeat after me Wendelstein 7-X, Wendelstein 7-X, Wendelstein 7-X
Looks like a bad panorama
I believe the twisting shape is an attempt to make the plasma more stable
Why doesn’t it need to be smooth? Why are there gaps in between the tiles? Why are there platelets somewhere and big plates elsewhere? I clearly don’t understand any of this.
d
In a fusion reactor like this the very hot plasma that is the cause of (and the result of) the fusion reaction is contained within a magnetic field and doesn't actually touch the walls of the vessel. It is in fact so hot that if it was actually in contact with the wall it would destroy pretty much any material known to mankind. Even things you would normally consider to be quite fireproof and hard to melt (like tungsten) would actually evaporate, resulting in damage to the reactor, contamination of the plasma (probably preventing any further fusion reactions from happening) and cooling of the plasma due to heat getting transferred to the reactor vessel. The tiles are there to keep the intense radiative heat and radiation away from the more sensitive materials behind them. The reason for the different shaped tiles has to do with the weird shape this reactor vessel has (the "why" on that one is... complicated, but goes back to that magnetic field mentioned at the start of this reply). The tile shapes are chosen such that they can cover the surface as best as possible while fitting to the shape of the reactor vessel without protruding into the plasma contained within the magnetic field
Thank you. Very informative.
Wendelstein 7-X Nuclear Fusion Device
The aim of fusion research is to develop a climate- and environmentally-friendly power plant. Similar to the sun, it is to generate energy from the fusion of atomic nuclei.