No, we didn't use Magic to Crush this Can...

hi today is the second video in our series on thermonuclear fusion [Music] a couple of months ago we put out the first video where I discussed fusion the principles behind fusion as well as some of the properties of the burning plasmas that are the core of what is going to be controlled thermonuclear fusion in the near future in addition to that I also went through some of the laboratory tricks and techniques that would allow you to generate a plasma at home the vacuum techniques and technology and the high voltage because the temperature of a burning plasma is upwards of a hundred and fifty million degrees no physical material can contain that plasma without either being destroyed or in turn cooling the plasma and stopping the reaction and so as a result the only way that we can contain that plasma is to take advantage of the fact that the deuterium and the tritium nuclei and the resulting helium nuclei otherwise known as alpha particles are charged so a powerful magnetic field can manipulate as well as contain the plasma without it ever physically contacting any any solid materials so today what I'm going to talk about is some of the principles behind what generates and what manipulates magnetic fields and how they interact with matter now the simplest charged particle is an electron and an electron can be associated with a magnetic field in a couple of ways first it has its own magnetic field it's actually like a tiny little bar magnet with an orientation of north and south and that orientation can be flipped it actually has a up or down or essentially a north or a south and it's called spin and in addition to that magnetic field which is always associated with the electron as the electron moves through space in this example in the direction of my right hand thumb there is a field distortion in space associated with that motion that follows the direction of my right hand fingers it's called the right hand rule and that orientation doesn't mean that the field lines or the field is spinning around the direction of motion it just simply has a an orientation that is unique just like for example in chemistry they call that chirality or mirror image or in a shop that would be the same thing as a left and a right hand thread on a screw it's not actually spinning or moving but it's unique just like my hands you can't interchange the left and right hand you'll always be able to identify them and so because of the right hand rule depending on the orientation or the direction of motion we will get a field direction that corresponds to the direction of the motion of the electron and that motion of the electron will distort the field in space around the motion of the electron so if we put a detector and pass the detector with the electron we will detect a change in the magnetic field due to its passage and the direction of that change will be associated with the direction of the motion of the electron that is related to the motion not the spin will get into the spin in a second now when physical materials interact like you could take a nail and a hammer and you slam onto the nail the atoms in the hammer and the nail don't actually physically contact it is the interaction of the fields that produce the force that drives the nail so the forces can be very very great they can be tremendous and so rather than speaking physically what I'm going to show you in this little apparatus here is that depending on the direction of the field these fields can interact with each other and either attract the electrons associated with them and the macroscopic materials that contain the electrons can be attracted because the electrons are attracted because the fields are attracted or conversely they can oppose or they can resist or repel each other so in this apparatus what I have is a very acura volvo transformer hooked up to a high voltage power supply which charges a capacitor bank and I have a little trigger switch here which will close an SCR or silicon controlled rectifier basically it's a high current very rapid solid-state switch when I hit this switch I can dump all the power of capacitor bank in about one millisecond and produce as much as 15,000 amps in a very short period of time and that power will travel through these two conductors the way I have this wired right now is that the positive of the capacitors is hooked up to the top of these two conductors and because of this conductive wire here the rods here will experience the same polarity they'll have the same positive voltage at this end at the other end I have both of these ends of the rods hooked up through the SCR down to ground so when I close the switch the electrons will flow out of ground through the switch through these rods in the same direction and then up to the positive end of the capacitor where they will fill the electron deficit of the capacitor and basically discharge it so in this case because the electrons are coming up this way the field Direction associated with my right hand will be in the same direction in both rods and therefore the two fields will interact cooperatively to cause the rods to move together so let me go ahead and charge this up and I'll show you what I'm talking about so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to charge this up to about 120 volts 10 20100 and on three one two three see they're attracted to each other now what I'm going to do is rewire this now you can see I've got the ground side hooked up to this end of this rod takes a loop over here and goes down this rod to the high voltage side of the capacitor so the electrons who are going up in this rod and they are going down in this rod and so the electric fields are now opposing each other and so they should move apart so let's charge this up all right on three one two three see they move apart so now what this is actually demonstrating is what's called zeta pinch or z-axis pinch effectively when the electrons in a plasma or in an electron beam are all traveling in the same direction they're generating magnetic fields that are all cooperative the consequence is that the beam tends to constrict itself it tends to become narrow that's why lightning and spark discharges don't tend to just be balls of repulsive electrons they tend to gather they tend to tighten into a tiny thin streamer and that is the result of zeta pinch now what we're going to do is going to talk a little bit about spin now let's look at spin basically as I said before the electron has polarity to it just like a little bar magnet but the effect of macroscopically of a magnet on most materials is not detectable because the trillions of atoms inside this bench inside of the main presenter of this plastic electron are all randomly oriented so even though the electrons some of them may attract a magnet and some may repel net-net does really no effect on these macroscopic objects because of the random orientation of the spin of the electrons that make up the material now certain materials ferromagnetic materials like the metal inside of this players do have the ability to flip their spins in response to a magnetic field so for example if I take this magnet to the players you can see that attracting the player even though the player is not magnetic and even though the player itself has a random orientation of electron spins before the field of the electron gets near it as soon as the influence of that field it's near those electrons the iron allows those electron spins to all line up in the same direction and effectively north-to-south attract the magnet when I remove the magnet effectively most of these spins are allowed to randomize again so if I reverse the direction of the magnet it still attracts because they reorient in the opposite direction and I produce the same sort of attractive force now what's kind of interesting about this though is that not every single one of those electrons that realign when I reverse the magnet actually free up when I move the magnet away and remove the magnetic field and so if you take a look down here on the bench I have another piece of iron in this little tool and I have a little nail here and if you see the iron here the metal here does not attract the nail but if I take that same magnet and I put it on the end of this tool like this now when I take this tool and put it by the nail it attracts it not 100% of all of the electron spins in this ferromagnetic material are able are free to read randomized a few of them state oriented according to that magnetic field this is important if you've ever worked in a shop this can be a real hassle and so they actually make devices electronic devices that will be magnetized tools because as you can imagine if all the tools wrenches bits and milling machine equipment are magnetized they will attract metal chips they will pull screws out of holes that you're trying to assemble items out of and so as a consequence this is not a useful magnetization however if we want to produce a permanent magnet a strong magnet if we take certain materials ceramics like neodymium boron comes like a ceramic powder and we put it into a mold and then we bring it up to a very high temperature and a very high pressure we Center it into a macroscopic precursor of a bar magnet when we then place a very powerful magnetic field usually an electronic or electromagnetic pulse that creates a very strong magnetic field momentarily it will align all the spins of the material inside of the magnet and when we remove the field this remains oriented as a result it's permanently magnetized a permanent magnet now if you look over here I have another little example of a permanent magnet now what I have here if you I'll tip this over so that you can see what I'm talking about I have a ring shaped magnet this is an N 52 neodymium boron high strength magnet but it's in the shape of a ring and the field associated with this ring is in the shape of a doughnut mathematically it's called a toroid and when you hear about people talking about fusion reactors they call them tokamaks and it's a word that's based on Russian term acronym and the T in the tokamak stands for toroidal that is the shape of the magnetic containment bottle inside of the nuclear reactor in this case because we have a toroidal magnetic field but it is permanent it's stable it's not changing if we take a small coil of wiper and we lay it on top of here and don't move anything and you look here you'll see that we're not generating any kind of a current because basically there's no work being done on the electrons inside of that coil but if I take that coil watch the meter and I raise it up you can see I get a voltage and if I look right down you can see I get a voltage but only during the motion and depending on how I have this oriented that little dot on this cheap meter represents a negative so you can see in one direction I have one polarity in the other direction I have the other polarity the idea being that when a electron moves through space it generates a distortion of moving distortion in the field associated with it conversely if you take an electron and you create a moving magnetic or a distortion of a magnetic field around the electron you will move it so a lot of this sort of understanding of electrons and electron fields and any kind of a charged particle in a magnetic field there's always two ways to look at it there's a cause and effect and an effect in the causes so in this case because I'm generating energy essentially I'm doing some work in order to create the current that you read on the meter if I had very very sensitive hands when I move this up and I moved it down I'd actually be able to detect a slight force or resistance to my motion has to because I can't create energy out of nothing so I have to be doing work on this the problem is my hands on sensitive enough so I can't feel the resistance of the wire to the motion that I'm creating here but we are clearly producing the current now it's interesting though we can scale this up to the point that you can actually see the effect of the force created by the conquer acting field and I'll show you that over here okay now I have another magnet over here same sort of toroidal field but it has much smaller hole and I have like the loop a conductor but in this case the conductor is a hollow aluminum tube effectively it accomplishes the same thing when I take this aluminum conductor and I pass it through a magnetic field I'll generate a current in the conductor the current that's generated by a field will itself produce a field moving electrons and those fields will always oppose each other that's the only way that you can create work when you're moving the electrons through the field and in fact if it didn't it would end the universe because effectively we would essentially be reversing entropy we would be creating energy from nothing we have to do work to get energy or like electrical power out and we have to use energy in order to create force or work so when I place this tube into this device you're gonna see a difference in the fall rate right now it's falling at 1g or 10 meters per second per second or 32 feet per second per second if I put it inside of this ring and drop it you can see how much more slowly it falls because of the current that's generated in the conductor that opposes the field that produced the current so it drops much more slowly now if we come over here I'm going to show you something interesting this is a little scale and if take this aluminum tube and we place it int onto the scale you'll see that it weighs about 15 grams now if I take a similar-sized stainless steel tube denser you'll see that it weighs about 45 grams and if I take a similar-sized copper tube and I weigh it here you'll see that it weighs slightly more but close to 45 grams 47 grams now if I take these three tubes and once again this is the aluminum you saw how slow that was I'll do it one more time now I take the stainless steel three times heavier and I drop it through here it's almost unaffected or the slowing is so small that it's difficult to even see it now you might think okay that's because it's heavier right yeah it is to some extent because it's heavier however remember the copper was even heavier than the stainless steel and if we put it in here you'll notice that it does slow down not as much as the aluminum because it still is much heavier but it's much slower than the stainless steel that's because the copper has such a high electrical conductivity that the same amount of work will generate a larger current more electrons and a greater opposing field when we drop this through here now an interesting thing is what if we could produce an even higher electrical conductivity so I have here some liquid nitrogen and I have two identical aluminum tubes I'm going to put one in the liquid nitrogen we're going to cool it off kind of exciting now remember how slowly this dropped let's count it on three one two three one thousand one about one second roughly now if I take this aluminum is now about three times more conductive than it is at room temperature and we'll put it in here and we'll count ready 1 1 2 3 4 slower it's the same tube it's the same weight but the conductivity is higher so the drop rate is slower because the current is greater you can imagine what would happen if we put a superconductor in here now that's kind of neat but what I want to do now is as the Oracle told neo in the matrix it's really going to bake your noodle later on is what happens if I take that same aluminum rod that I had here and I cut it so basically I eliminate the ability of it to conduct a current around in a circle like this theoretically if it slowed down with the aluminum like this this shouldn't work because I don't have a complete conductive circuit and if you look it still slows it down not quite as much but it's definitely working the reason that is is because some of the current goes all the way around but the majority of the current actually follows very tiny nano scale orbitals they're called gyro orbitals or gyro radii and the reason this is important is because that occurs within the entire mass of the material and when building thermonuclear fusion reactors the importance of the intensity of the magnetic field is not just linear so if we can increase the magnetic field strength by say a factor of 2 we can improve the containment of the plasma not only because we can keep everything farther away from the walls but because the tiny little nuclei the positively charged nuclei whipping around inside of this toroidal field there are small perturbations that can occur little variations in temperature little variations in pressure which can cause those orbitals not to follow a very nice orbit around the minor axis of the of the toroid but they can begin to oscillate and they can begin to follow pathways that will eventually carry them into the walls and essentially remove them from the reaction the more tightly those orbitals wrap around those field lines those little tiny spirals forming a little tiny spiral as it moves through the more resistant those nuclei are to what are called MHD or magnetohydrodynamic perturbations or instabilities it's one of the big Bane's of these reactors is to keep those unstable orbitals from building up to the point that they break down consequently a stronger magnetic field affects the size the containment of the of the fusion reactor not linearly but like the third power double the field and we can increase containment reduce the size reduce the cost and speed up the the development of these reactors many many fold and that's why magnetic fields are so critical so now let's kick this up about three orders of magnitude let me show you something interesting a couple of minutes ago I showed you the effects of zeta pinch or when charged particles whether their electrons or positively charged nuclei are traveling in the same direction they tend to pull together and concentrate the the energy this is called a theta pinch machine and basically it's going to demonstrate the force that can be generated by opposing fields from a conductor with a rapidly changing field and a conductor that experiences that effect of that rapidly changing field it's otherwise known as a cam crusher kind of a neat device now the setup here is pretty simple again a very act will give us a variable voltage input to a high-voltage power supply this power supply will then charge these pulse capacitors these are a little different than the electrolytic we used in the other example because these are designed with a very low self inductance and so therefore they can discharge all of their power in about a microsecond instead of about a millisecond so they can produce much higher peak currents and because of the fact that these things generate such a high peak current we can't use the scr the solid-state switch that we used in the previous experiment we have to use what's called a spark gap very simple device though two tungsten electrodes are held in clamps on either end and are separated in the centre by about a one millimeter gap that gap contains air and that air is a sufficient insulator so that the two thousand volts or so that I'm going to put across here cannot jump that gap but when I take a forty thousand volt pulse from this device here and send it to the center section here I create a corona discharge essentially an ionization of the air inside of that gap as a result the resistance goes down the insulating property of the air goes down and now the electrons from the capacitor can jump the gap in an arc or a spark and effectively conduct the electricity through the loop and back into the capacitor this can switch much higher currents and it actually has a switching time that's measured down in the nanosecond so this device is that what we're going to be using to switch this now on the meter over there I've got this hooked on to the capacitors and the ground through what's called a voltage divider so effectively what you read on the meter is one tenth of the actual voltage across here because this can't read two thousand volts and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna plug this on I'm gonna plug this in will start ramping up the voltage and then when I get close to the point that we're gonna fire it I think anybody with headphones is gonna want to turn them down because this can be a little bit loud so let's put on a little safety equipment and plug it in we're going to be looking for about 200 volts across the meter here we go 1000 volts 1,500 all right on 3 2 1 whoa now what's interesting about this is you can see that the can has been crushed all the way around its periphery and in some it's even a little warm and you can see on some YouTube videos where they'll explain how this happens and they'll explain that the current and the can actually causes the can to crush itself that's not actually true because the high voltage or the high current feet of the high field maybe 5 6 Tesla that's built up inside this coil is sufficiently strong and rapidly changing enough that the current inside the can can reach 10 20,000 amps because of that very high current we get a very high field in the can and as I explained when I showed the counter current flow of electricity in those two rods the opposite sides of this can have current traveling in opposite directions so if the can were in isolation and we could get that kind of current into it it would actually explode rather than contract the reason the can is crushed is it's crushed by the field of the coil the coil is crushing the can and because the coil is much stronger than the can that's why it induces this crush and because the coil is much closer to the wall of the can than the opposite wall of the can that's why the net force is a crushing force the reason this is so important has to do with modern superconductors the limitation on the ability to produce a successful thermonuclear reactor is really limited by the fields that we can produce and typically for many decades they've been depending on conventional superconductors neodymium niobium tin and the problem with that kind of a superconductor is that there are two things that will cause a superconductor to fail to superconductor one is obviously temperature above what's called the critical temperature these virtual entities called Cooper pairs or essentially pairs of electrons that form an electron wave through the conductor allow for that lossless resistance less conduction and when you go above a certain temperature the thermal vibrations or phonons will cause those Cooper pairs to break up and you now have a conventional conductor that's pretty well known because you know it's a low temperature superconductor but there's another property that will cause a superconductor to fail to super conduct and that is the magnetic field in which it's immersed inside of a superconductor there are very tiny little defects in its super conductivity process and these tiny little magnetic vortices that are present inside the conductor can disrupt those Cooper pairs but the point is they're so small and they're so weak that as long as they remain separated they're not enough to break up the pair's and stop the super conductive activity however those little tiny vortices of little tornados can move around and they can coalesce into larger vortices which in fact can stop the super conductive process the rare earth yttrium which is the most common of the revco rare-earth barium copper oxide material this the yttrium tends to pin those micro vortices and keep them from moving around and so you can immerse a high-temperature superconductor like these Repco tapes in a far higher field before it will fail to operate and the field that you can reach is enormous ly higher than the field in a conventional superconductor just to give you an idea of what kind of forces were talking about clearly with this system here I was producing some pretty significant forces but when you take a tape like this and you wrap it up in a coil with thousands of ramps 90 to 95% of all the material inside of this is not the copper layer that you see on the outside and it's not the 1 micron thick of superconductor that's conducting about a mega amp per square centimeter it's a high tensile strength stainless steel or Hastelloy and when you wrap this up and form a disc you may have several centimeters of thickness in this coil and the fields that can be produced are so great that sometimes before the superconductor fails to super conduct the entire coil will explode so you can imagine the kind of forces you're talking about enormous the world's highest super conductive magnetic field was recently produced with one of these coils and reached 45 Tesla that's about four times as high as the design fields that are anticipated or needed in the ITER reactor that's located in France this enormous monstrous industrial park size machine requires this huge size because of its weak magnetic fields the only way to keep the the hot plasma from the walls is simply make it so large that it takes a very long time for the lone stray random nuclei to be able to touch the wall and effectively leave the reaction as the magnetic field increases the size of the machine decreases by the third power so if you can double the magnetic field you can reduce the size of the device by a factor of eight if you can triple it 27 times if you can quadruple it you can imagine so you move from industrial sized machine I mean industrial park size machines you know Airport hangar size machines to something that might even fit in this room that's why this whole concept of thermonuclear fusion in the near term has become achievable that's why it's so exciting this is really going to happen so now that I've shown you with the solid materials let me show you what happens with a magnetic field when we interact with plasma okay so now what I have right here is the setup for the plasma tube and if you want the details of how exactly this is put together how to operate it take a look at the previous video because I go into a lot of details today what I'm going to do though is a slight variation between last time and this time because so many people in the comment section said hey we want to see a whole bunch of different kinds of gases and different color discharges and so what I decided to do is to do a discharge rather than a typical gas to do it in a mercury gas or a mercury vapor the reason that significant is because that's what drives all fluorescent tubes mercury is a remarkable material and that it's one of the most efficient generators of light per watt in existence including LEDs and the only downside is that most of that energy that it produces is produced around 250 nanometers in the UV you can't see it so what they do is they coat the inside of the tube where the UV can contact the phosphor and the phosphor then glows the bright white driven by the UV from the the ultraviolet light actually that's what also makes LED lights white because the gallium nitride diode that's producing the light actually is a deep blue color and it drives phosphor on the surface of the LED to produce the white light so in this case what we're gonna do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to hook up the vacuum pump I'm going to turn it on and begin drawing this down then I'm gonna flush this with a little buffer argon to get rid of any air and any water and then as the mercury evaporates under the low pressure you'll begin to see the bright blue discharge because this is a quartz tube the UV can get out so I'm going to be wearing some safety goggles when this is on and the other thing I just want to mention here is the cold trap this is our liquid nitrogen Dewar and the reason I have this on this cold trap is because I don't want the mercury vapor to get into the air even though we have an activated carbon filter and the output from the pump I'd rather not contaminate the inside of the pump and the oil with the mercury vapor so by passing it through into this cold chamber or into this cold trap that has a little molecular sieve at the bottom of it and run it down in liquid nitrogen temperature all that mercury will adhere to the surface of the the molecular sieve and then when we're done I can simply dump this out in a disposal receptacle and keep it out of the air so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on the pump and we'll get the pump the pressure down in the tube so we'll turn on the pump and then I'm going to open the valve that allows the air to be drawn out of the tube you'll hear the different sound in the pump then I'm going to go ahead and open the argon and lit a little argon flush through here so that we can get rid of the nitrogen in the water vapor and let that go for a few seconds then I'm going to go ahead and plug in the power supply and run this up to about 2,000 volts we'll see what it looks like now you don't see anything right now simply because I have a high enough pressure of argon that it's acting as an insulator so when I turn the argon off the pressure goes down we'll start to see the discharge let's go ahead and turn this down and see what we see see the bright blue discharge I can even smell a faint aroma of ozone because the UV is actually able to create ozone and that's what you use in some ozone generators is a low pressure mercury vapour lamp now one of the things that you'll notice here as the electrons are traveling through this tube moving from the cathode to the anode end they pass through this area here where I have that toroidal or ring shaped magnet and if you look carefully you can see how the shape of the column of mercury changes because of the magnet what that's doing is essentially creating a theta pinch the mercury vapor is actually being pulled or pushed away from the edges of the magnet where the field is strongest and trying to find a narrow spot in the middle as far as it can get away from the magnet but in addition it's also the fact that the current that's caused inside of the moving electrons inside the beam of moving electrons creates a counter magnetic field which opposes the magnetic field that generates that and so therefore you get a constriction just like you got with the can crusher now over here I have a coil and this coil is simply hundred couple hundred wraps up a 16-gauge copper coil and what's interesting about this is in order to generate a similar kind of constriction a similar data pinch I have to run about two kilowatts through this coil and you'll see how it compares to what's about a half Tesla field from this permanent magnet so I'm going to connect this up here to the power supply that we use for our old electric jet and it's off right now where it should be and there's no power going through here I can only run this for about three seconds before it becomes too hot because we're gonna put about two thousand Watts through here you'll see on the meter the gauges and what you're going to look at is the sum of the two amp readings that happen when I turn this on this you'll see on the inset inside the video but what you'll also see from the camera position is what happens to the column of electrons and the stimulated ions inside of that coil the first coil and then you can compare that to what happens inside the permanent magnet so on the count of three I'm going to turn this on and you'll see what happens one two three see how it constricted it I'll do it again one two three now that magnets already probably too hot to touch and the significance of this is that clearly if I've only got about a half a Tesla field in here and it takes me 2,000 watts to not even equal the constricting effect the controlling effect this has over the electrons and the ions you can imagine that there is no conceivable way with a thermonuclear reactor that you could run with anything other than superconductors it would be you use all the power you produced and then some to just try to constrict the plasma so superconductivity is the only way to go this is a nice setup using the mercury because it's so bright that even though it's a bright day outside you can see a pretty nice column of light here now what we're going to do in subsequent videos is we're going to talk a little bit more about the super activity process and in addition I'm gonna see if I can get some arrangement if possible to interview some of the people that are involved in the active programs that are working on thermonuclear fusion there's a very active group down at MIT not that far from here and if we can make some sort of a connection with them I think it might be interesting to see what they can show us the reason I've got some doubts about this is because they are moving so fast and they are so close I think to some pretty significant breakthroughs that they are commercially funded they've actually got some power companies that are providing the funding and use it and some of the commercial scientists are actually working with the MIT groups so they're very proprietary and somewhat close-mouthed about the development simply because there's a lot of patents that are going to be coming out of this but if we can get an interview with them I think it would be very exciting because what they're doing is really really exciting so I hope you enjoyed the video and we're gonna be getting on to some other topics and hopefully reviewing some of the topics that people have been missing follow-ups on over the last year or so but this was exciting the potential of thermonuclear fusion is really exciting and I want to thank you very much for watching if you like the kind of material on the channel please subscribe I read all the comments and if you have questions or you want to make suggestions I'll answer as many of them as I can and most importantly if you think that what we're doing here is valuable its educational it's interesting it's fun please tell people because spreading the word about the channel really is more valuable to us than anything because it helps to extend our reach and helps us to spend our time and give more people more information so I want to thank you very much for watching you have a wonderful day stay safe and we'll see you soon [Music] you

Channel: Tech Ingredients

Views: 481,219

Rating: 4.958971 out of 5

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Id: -2QaTyDJDEI

Length: 39min 25sec (2365 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020