Putting Plasma to Work (DIY Fusion Reactors, Magnetrons and More!)

what does bolt of lightning I can't fire an ion entrance and a nuclear fusion reactor has been common they're all examples of plasmas plasma is when the weirder states matter and one that most aren't very familiar with but understanding how they work allows for some amazing processes to possible this video is about size 9 just any forms and how we can first make it and then learn the harnesses build functional devices from fire to fusion there's a lot to cover so let's hop right in first to understand what plasma is let's look at the simplest way to make some when you strike a match or a lighter you've just made a small amount of plasma which we call fire fires the results the chemical method producing plasma when you first strike a lighter Tiny's superheated pieces of Slynt are sprayed over a small tube or contains being released when sparks touch the butane and the mixture of butane and oxygen in the air is just right a chemical reaction is kicked off the release of a tremendous amount of energies all this energy rapidly super heats the mixture of gases the veil add the atoms get hotter and hotter eventually they have so much energy that the electrons orbiting around the atomic nuclei can't hold on any longer and they start to jump energy levels and eventually fall off it's almost as though the atoms themselves are melted this process no divided they should lead to a very complex mixture of electronic ions and a huge assortment of molecules with variety of charges notice radicals this soup of charged particles is what we call plasma and have lots of interesting properties for example it's very conductive and almost electricity to flow through easily the energy release in that chemical reaction is enough for the nuclei to melt apart though so they stay intact and no new elements are created and everything ionized energy is released until eventually there's not enough left to continue to ionize things and everything recombined leaving only hot gas pipes in the example of fire the energy allows things ionize comes from a chemical reaction of burning butane if you provide the energy in a different way you can still produce ponds but one way to do this is through the use of high voltage electricity lightning is a great example of aesthetic charges producing the clouds massive quantities of electrons build up in the lower part of half this highly negative area repelled electrons in the ground below inducing that positive charge sometimes the intense electric field generated because the air out sharp objects ground to lead to charged particles these can then iron in the air and produce a small amount of plasma called a coronal discharge when it happens is known as st. Elmo's fire engines we've seen on boats for centuries often so much charge build-up along the stream of positively charged particles will hard to grow call an upwards leader these leaders will be produced all over the area outdoor lighting stone in the clouds so many electrons filled up that they start to repel themselves a stream of electrons called extremer start grow and branch out of the cloud until one connects to one of the growing upwards leaders on the ground in the instant of this connection all of the Bills of electrons flow down the connection as if or a wire allowing the charges to equalize and producing a bright flash in the process as they flow the electrons smash into air molecules knocking out more electrons and producing plasma for every centimeter of air you need about ten thousand volts for that connection that happens spontaneously in an art collector inspector introduced if the voltage is too low the electrons don't have enough energy to push their way to the air and just get stopped before a connection is made this is known as the breakdown voltage and it's closely related to the pressure and type of gas or material in the way keep this in mind it will be important later enlightening the voltages involved to be upwards of millions of volts which is why lightning bolts are so large and can be started from such great distances making them keep lightning lasers in a home or a lab setting is actually fairly cheap so obviously not merely the same scale of all of the devices that can produce large bolts electricity template oils can produce arcs that are the most similar in natural lightning depending on where we live the electricity that comes out of the average wall socket is usually in the range of 120 to 240 volts a template oil steps up this voltage to several million volts allowing huge arcs to form easily however we want to learn to use plasma to build functional devices and while peddling oils are cool to play with are super useful for making these as the voltage is actually two pi and the current to load for those applications if we want to use plasma to make anything more than a decorative plasma ball we need to build a high voltage system that we can control and that puts out a more reasonable hold in a system like the one we're going to build to be used for a wide range of applications so we'll be focusing on two in this video the first will be a small demonstration tuition reactor and the second will be advice called a magnetron which uses semiconductor manufacturer we'll get into how these work later but first let's build our high voltage system to power them the core of our system will be a large transformer these devices can set up a low voltage to a higher one that the cost of some current luckily home electricity can come in more than 10 amps so there's plenty of courage to spare a transformer is made of two coils of wire wrapped around an iron core the political change in portion to the number terms of each coil and the ratio between them if you have 100 turned on the input side also known as a primary and 2000 terms on the secondary or output side the output voltage will be about 20 times higher so if you put a hundred volts in to get about 2,000 volts it just so happens that a transformer inside every microwave does exactly this my point up in Transformers form Ott's for sure for super easy to find online or by salvaging from a broken pipe ways they're pretty tough so chances are if the microwaves is broken the transformer is still far and we're going to how to extract it in this video as there's already lots videos on how to do this on YouTube a word of warning though everything from this point on is extremely dangerous and should be done only with extreme caution while Monster High politics are also very tight current and will kill you very quickly if you touch one welds on the simplest way to wire of a mod is to cut one end off an extension cord and after stripping the wires inside connecting the hot to one side of the primary and the neutral to the other side of the private the ground wire can be ignored if your extension cord has one I would also add a switch to one side of the circuit or plug via end into a power bar that is an on/off switch this way you have a faster way to kill the power should you need to instead of having to rip the plug at wiring up the secondaries be a little weird depending on the model of the transformer you have to get if you're lucky you'll get a transformer if it's to open waters but occasionally one side is solder main bodied the transformer if this happens just solder a wire to it and be extra careful not to touch the outside of the transformer while driving in either case add a wire to each side and everything set up for the devices doesn't want to build there's a lot of problems with our setup that need to be addressed first there's no way to control the voltage precisely as it can only be turned on and off for simply making arcs that's fine but for devices that use plasma to do something like semiconductor manufacturing there needs to be a way to control it so to do that we need to add a piece to the primary side of the transformer ideally you use something called the very act which is a weird kind of transformer that allows you to throw a voltage between zero and hundred twenty volts by putting it before the primary we can change the voltage going into the transformer and so it's going to lead the voltage out however very acts especially the good high current ones can hurt find or expansions so instead we're going to use a homemade device called a scary act over at the king of Brandon grant Thompson made a great video on how to build one of these so be sure to check out that video for more info when we're building our system we couldn't find all the parts to use so we changed the design a bit to work with what we had available instead of the pulling mechanism in the original video we went for a rotating version the way this works is pretty simple as the liberators turn to brings to compare electrodes closer together or further apart they're placed in this house with baking soda solution so electricity can flow between them as the distance between the electrode creases so does the resistance allowing more current flow if the electrodes are allowed to touch my maximum amount of power will be allowed to flow through here you can see we control the speed of the motor that has meant interrupting or scary acts by turning the dial there's one last change we can make to the primary side of our high voltage system which is to add a current limiting device called an inductive ballast this will prevent too much current component or system intensely blowing things up later all it is is the second thoughts at this type of secondary shorted out and primary is paid in series with the primary of our main transformer so for our systems the output of a scary act is headed to one side of conductive balance and the other sides connect to the one side of the other cloth for more information on how the ducts balance work I've added a link of scope now we can look at the output side of our system understands everything thus far has been alternating first this is why I've been referring to two wires as hot and neutral rather than positive and negative in alternating current there's no positive or negative electrons are moving back and forth rather than in circuit for vacuum based plasma devices we usually needed direct currents to that electricity flows in a consistent direction this will allow us to control what happens to the plasma and the motion of the particles inside so to go through 82 beats you need something called a full wave bridge rectifier also notice diode bridge all it is is for 10 kilovolts ions arrangement diamond pattern like this making sure that the implicit emphasize of the diodes are lined up forever the input is hearing here and it doesn't matter which output wire of the transformer is attached to which side of the diode bridges input the output of the diode bridge does have a distinct positive and negative side since everything is now direct current the short version of how this works goes like this alternating current is a sine wave that goes from plus 2002-2004 the diodes essentially flip one of these Peaks over so that the current can only go from 0 to approximately plus 2000 volts I've added a great little tool in the description that makes it very easy to visualize what's actually going on so be sure to check that out and mess around with it if you want to learn more once I don't touch the attic pasture across the edge of our diamond bridge the smoothness of the peaks into a nice stable DC voltage rather than pulses this is because the capacitor holds releases charge so while the next pulse is rising the capacitor is still slowly releasing power compensating tool in voltage is low this is entirely optional but recommended always be sure to discharge the capacitor by shorting the two terminals before put your hands anywhere near ER for our system the capacitor no microwave will be perfect for this and with that our high voltage system is done we're now well on our way to building our plasma devices but before we can build them we need to talk about pressure earlier in the video we talked about the breakdown voltage of the gas this is the amount of electrical potential required to force electrons through a gas and it's closely tied to the pressure if we decrease the pressure we're effectively removing millions of atoms of gas so there's a lot less stuff in the way the lower we make the pressure the easier it is for electrons to flow and the less voltage is required for devices like fusers or magnetrons they require a fairly deep vacuum to function properly far deeper than anything you'd experience in day-to-day life to reach these pressures requires at least one special pump the more serious the application the more complex and powerful pump needs to be for the purposes of this video in learning the basics we're only going to use a mechanical pump in this case we're using an edwards rotary vane pump capable of reducing the pressure inside a chamber to at least ten to a hundred millet or Torr is a measure of vacuum where one Torr is about one thousandth of atmospheric pressure our pump needs to be able to reduce the pressure to one ten-thousandth to one one hundred thousandth of atmospheric pressure I've used both in Edwards model tool and a model five successfully for this but many others will work as well a cheap vacuum pump usually won't cut it though so make sure to check the pressure it's rated for before buying one if we wanted a deeper vacuum or we were going to be letting lots of gas into the device we would put a secondary pump after the mechanical pump these come usually in two forms diffusion pumps and turbo pumps and we'll talk more about how they work and when they're needed in a future video now that we've got a pump we'll need a chamber to container vacuum it previously I made a video on how to make electric chamber out of common glass jars and I put a link in the description all we need now is to connect our pump to our chamber and add by voltage system we built earlier the actual plumbing for the vacuum system is fairly straightforward though it'll change based on what device you plan on building and the performance in our case we ran a line from our vacuum pump to a t-bar one side of the barbed was connected to a short length of tubing and then to have our the other side of the valve had another short life tubing and a straight barb on the end this will allow us to attach a balloon to supply gases as well as the vent to atmosphere this isn't ideal but we're working with what we have in other systems I've added a line that can be attached directly to tanks for specific gases the other side of our key barb went first to a vacuum gauge and then into our chamber now a note about materials when you build a vacuum system you're going to start to run into all sorts of problems that will affect how you does a vacuum you can easily pull for example most materials of a property called outgassing on placed in a vacuum this means they slowly release small amounts of stored gases and volatile molecules that will screw with your pressure so it's important to only use materials suited to vacuum work this usually means as much metal as possible but some plastics are also okay final is usually okay for tubing and I haven't had many problems with it though it's just getting the kind vintage reinforcement built a door it'll tend to collapse under the pressure [Music] when it comes to adhesives to stick everything together the best off-the-shelf product is easily JV well it's come to be known as the duct tape from the vacuum world because of how effective it is when chasing leaks it can also be baked up to 500 degrees C but you need a deeper vacuum you can actually bake your chamber to force any remaining volatiles out before you turn on the vacuum pump in a future video I'll go through all the ways to chase leaks and troubleshoot systems like this finally we've got all the pieces we need to make our advices work and can move on to final assembly to see all the pieces work together let's first look at fusers and how they're set up a fuse er is the simplest form of fusion reactor and is basically just two electrodes one inside the other the central one is connected to the negative side of our high-voltage system and the outer is connected to the positive side before we can turn on the power we first need to turn on the pump and let the pressure get as low as possible this can take a few minutes so be patient but if the pressure doesn't come even close to 100 milli Torr range you've definitely got a leak when most of the gas is removed the high voltage can be turned on when this happens electrons immediately start flying across the electrodes smashing into the small amount of gas molecules left in the chamber this ionize of the gas and give the nuclei a positive charge these positively charged ions are attracted to the negatively charged inner electrode and so the nuclei start to accelerate toward it if we were to supply enough voltage the ions could have enough energy that when they smash into each other it would actually be able to fuse into heavier elements however our system's capabilities are far lower than what's required for that purpose as that would be very dangerous without extra precautions in a future video we'll build an upgraded version of the system capable of that and get into the specifics of how to achieve fusion whilst a face we'll also explore other models of reactor that are far more complex and how they work if everything has been wired up correctly and there's no leaks in the vacuum system the whole chamber should fill with plasma when it's turned on to show how important the pressure is here's what happens if I let a little bit of gas into the chamber while it's running the plasma quickly retracts to only the inner grid as the electrons can't travel very far as there's too much stuff in the way when I first started building to users I didn't have a strong enough pump as I was using the compressor out of a fridge and this retracted pounds mode was all I could make when I finally switched to a proper pump the Glo I was greeted with was a magnificent sight that I'll never forget if you're interested in users you may also want to check out the teaser net forums there's a lot of great information on how these devices work and some amazing builds people have done over the years if users are a great example of how you can control the flow and motion of charged particles by using electric fields positive charges move towards negative electric fields and vice-versa but charged particles can also be manipulated by the magnetic fields when I built my first user I noticed this was possible when I would put magnet near the chamber and can see the plasma getting dragged around if we take the idea further we enter devices like magnetrons rather than an outer and inner grid magnetrons or at least the version will be making simply have a top and bottom electrode in this case the bottom is an aluminum plate which the chamber is resting on and is connected to the negative side of our high-voltage system by placing a pair of magnets underneath the bottom plate we can bend plasma into a tight ring here you can see the magnetic field of the two magnets visualized using some magnet view films the ring of plasma super heats the metal it's in contact with and causes it to sublimate or turn directly into a gas if we put a substrate like a microscope slide or a piece of metal above this it should get coated in a very thin layer of metal however getting them to actually do this can be extremely difficult of they're very sensitive to pressure they must have a pressure of no more than a hundred millet or but even that's not usually good enough one to ten millet or is closer to what's needed to function properly and at these levels chasing outgassing becomes a nightmare if you're going to build one I would highly recommend using a secondary pump to help keep up with all the outgassing in a future video we'll explore how to troubleshoot magnetrons and get them working as they're easily the pickiest vacuum device I've ever attempted build so really need a whole video just to work on the troubleshooting when they're functional their uses are extremely broad I originally wanted to build one so I could code objects in titanium nitride as it's extremely tough and also bio safe so it can be used to make implants it let's review what we've covered in this plasma comes in many forms and is made of a soup of charged particles it's produced when a material usually gas is given so much energy that the electrons melt off of the nuclei the energy can be chemical or electrical and the properties of the plasma greatly depend on its composition given sufficient energy the ions in the plasma can be coaxed into smashing into each other and fusing into heavier elements plasma can be used to evaporate metals and is important for everything from semiconductor manufacturing to medical implants I hope this video has served as a good introduction to the world of plasma physics and all the amazing things that can be done with it we'll be revisiting and expanding on a lot of the topics covered in future videos so this was meant to act as a primer for that and to give you some ideas of how these systems work and how it's possible to build them yourself I've been working on these sorts of systems for eight years now and they never cease to amaze me they're tricky to build but when they work the results of a breathtaking with the basics covered I look forward to exploring other techniques in the future everything from electron beam evaporation ion engines so be sure to check back every other Monday for all of that let's offer this video I hope you've enjoyed you can have and want to see more DIY physics videos be sure to subscribe and consider clicking the bell to get email updates when I post new videos if you've got suggestions for future videos or other devices you think we should try and build be sure to leave them in the comments down below as always I love reading your suggestions and take them into account when choosing new projects if you'd like to help the continued production of science videos like this one I'd really appreciate if you check out my patreon every penny that I can put towards videos will make them better thanks I'll see you next time

Channel: The Thought Emporium

Views: 339,485

Rating: 4.9292078 out of 5

Keywords: fusion, nuclear, high voltage, vacuum, farnsworth, iec, magnetron, semiconductor, sputtering, deposition, diy, how to, instructional, build, plasma, radicals, ions, ion engine, tesla coil, inductive ballast, diode bridge, full wave rectifier, lightning, fire, chemistry, physics, nuclear fusion, fusor, fusor.net, scihouse, theartlav

Id: ZO5IZz9NgJA

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/pleasantvalleymonday]

Now, to find a way to make fusion happen reliably on an industrial scale, which ought to happen one of these decades, right?