Author Topic: Lockheed-Martin unveils potentially major Fusion Reactor progress  (Read 71726 times)

Offline FinalFrontier

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Dubbed the compact fusion reactor (CFR), the device is conceptually safer, cleaner and more powerful than much larger, current nuclear systems that rely on fission, the process of splitting atoms to release energy. Crucially, by being “compact,” Lockheed believes its scalable concept will also be small and practical enough for applications ranging from interplanetary spacecraft and commercial ships to city power stations. It may even revive the concept of large, nuclear-powered aircraft that virtually never require refueling—ideas of which were largely abandoned more than 50 years ago because of the dangers and complexities involved with nuclear fission reactors.


Thought it was worth a separate thread to post this, and thought further it belongs here in AC section of the site. Article elaborates on expected development time with Lockheed stating they could have some of these running by 2020 ish. Also points out they developed them in part (possibly) with the thought of more efficient NTR engines for space and/or reviving a nuclear aircraft concept. Definitely neat stuff and this is a somewhat truly new concept particularly the shape of the plasma container vessel.

Source:
http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details
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Offline A12

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McGuire says. “The latest is a magnetized ion confinement experiment, and preliminary measurements show the behavior looks like it is working correctly. We are starting with the plasma confinement"

Plasma confinement: hic sunt leones.

(Bold mine)
« Last Edit: 10/15/2014 07:20 pm by A12 »

Offline FinalFrontier

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McGuire says. “The latest is a magnetized ion confinement experiment, and preliminary measurements show the behavior looks like it is working correctly. We are starting with the plasma confinement"

Plasma confinement: hic sunt leones.

(Bold mine)

Noted. I think they might be a little over confident here.
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Offline Blackjax

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Given how optimistic some of the more extreme stories covering this got, I was a little skeptical and went looking for some balanced reporting.  Here are a couple more sober viewpoints.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/10/lockheed-martin-nuclear-fusion-skeptical
http://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-bash-lockheed-on-nuclear-fusion-2014-10

However probably the most useful way to interpret the news might be found here:

http://xkcd.com/678/

Offline aceshigh

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those guys from Washington State University are skeptical of ANY fusion that is not theirs. They should be a bit more ethical imho.


people at Talk Polywell are having a good discussion speculating on the Skunkworks reactor based on photos and info. I really suggest reading Dan Tibbets posts
http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=5643

Offline alexterrell

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The picture of the reactor implies you could put a "hole" at one end and leak out high velocity plasma.

This could make a nice rocket engine.

VASIMR originally had fusion in mind until they figured out it was very hard, so they just stuck to microwave heating of the plasma.

Offline Ludus

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Is this LM upper management learning from Elon Musk that grand visions and inspiring hopeful technology projects have real present benefits?

Is this the sort of announcement that would have been more conditional and modest sounding before Musk showed that talking about putting a million colonists on Mars didn't do any harm and rather helped him in attracting the best young talent and dealing with Congress?

Offline RotoSequence

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Could be. They're throwing younger blood at this one, and are taking a more media savvy approach to the technology. They've uploaded all of their press photos onto their Flickr stream in very high resolution.

Offline MP99

The picture of the reactor implies you could put a "hole" at one end and leak out high velocity plasma.

This could make a nice rocket engine.

VASIMR originally had fusion in mind until they figured out it was very hard, so they just stuck to microwave heating of the plasma.
ISTM the issue is that you want to maximise "burning" of your fusionable fuel. Just opening up one end of the reactor would waste vast amounts of it. (Fission Fragment gets over this, but at the expense of truly tiny thrust.)

I'm just imagining how much tritium you'd need to fuel your engine. I'd think multiple tons of tritium (which seems to be implied) would be a tremendous safety hazard, never mind any issues about supplying that volume.

A fusion powered engine should follow the same relation of power / Isp / thrust as SEP, just with a different efficiency measure. Extreme Isp results in extremely low thrust.

I'd assume a fusion reactor with a small amount of fuel, plus a separate tank of purely passive propellant. Prop flow rate will be just high enough to cool the engine just enough to stop it melting.

Partially compensating for much lower exhaust temperature, 1H should also be a better propellant than 2H or 3H.

I wonder if there's any chance of operating this as a nuclear light bulb - perhaps a film of 1H providing film cooling. I presume not - the neutron flux would provide bulk heating of the jacket, so 1H would need to run through channels to cool it.

Cheers, Martin

Offline alexterrell

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I'd assume a fusion reactor with a small amount of fuel, plus a separate tank of purely passive propellant. Prop flow rate will be just high enough to cool the engine just enough to stop it melting.


But then you're stuck at Isp of about 900 - as NERVA was, using Hydrogen, but at chemical rocket temperatures.

What you'd want to do is inject plasma into the throttle - away from the place where the fusion reactions are happening - and use your magnetic confinement to keep this away from any materials.

I believe the proposals for fission fragment, and other fusion concepts, do this to "de throttle" the engine (unless you want it for multi-decade long Kuiper belt missions).

Quote
the neutron flux would provide bulk heating of the jacket

That is the other major drawback - to be really good for space flight you'd want aneutrionic fusion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion), and I believe the focus is on the proton-boron reaction.


Offline ChrisWilson68

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Is this LM upper management learning from Elon Musk that grand visions and inspiring hopeful technology projects have real present benefits?

Is this the sort of announcement that would have been more conditional and modest sounding before Musk showed that talking about putting a million colonists on Mars didn't do any harm and rather helped him in attracting the best young talent and dealing with Congress?

I think you misunderstand what separates Elon Musk from traditional aerospace companies and government programs.  It's not that Musk has grand visions.  It's the approach he takes to achieve those grand visions.  In particular, Musk focuses on cost and using proven technologies over pushing the technological edge.

Lockheed sank a significant amount of its own money into the X-33/VentureStar program in the late 1990s, before SpaceX existed, so don't think Lockheed needs to watch SpaceX to have grand visions and inspiring technology programs.

Sadly, like the VentureStar, this fusion reactor program may be an overly-optimistic attempt to jump too far ahead of the technology curve.

Offline clongton

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I wonder if there's any chance of operating this as a nuclear light bulb - perhaps a film of 1H providing film cooling.
Cheers, Martin

The jacket would need to be transparent to thermal energy.
Could we make one of pure quartz? I don't know.
If we could then an isp of 10,000 would be achievable and we wouldn't need to sacrifice thrust for it.
But that would be a hard engineering project because it couldn't have any imperfections at all.
If it did the whole jacket would vaporize and destroy the engine.
Perhaps one day we will be able to 3d-print a proof-of-concept jacket, laying down a single molecule per layer.
Any of you young engineers out there willing to tackle this for your thesis?
Chuck - DIRECT co-founder
I started my career on the Saturn-V F-1A engine

Offline clongton

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Sadly, like the VentureStar, this fusion reactor program may be an overly-optimistic attempt to jump too far ahead of the technology curve.

But they do appear to have turned a corner.
That's a major plus for the effort.
Chuck - DIRECT co-founder
I started my career on the Saturn-V F-1A engine

Online docmordrid

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Is this LM upper management learning from Elon Musk that grand visions and inspiring hopeful technology projects have real present benefits?

Is this the sort of announcement that would have been more conditional and modest sounding before Musk showed that talking about putting a million colonists on Mars didn't do any harm and rather helped him in attracting the best young talent and dealing with Congress?

I think you misunderstand what separates Elon Musk from traditional aerospace companies and government programs.  It's not that Musk has grand visions.  It's the approach he takes to achieve those grand visions.  In particular, Musk focuses on cost and using proven technologies over pushing the technological edge.
>

Where do supersonic retropropulsion, printing very powerful thrusters, flying printed LOX valves, and a full-flow staged combustion engone fit into the not-bleeding edge theory?

Yes - several have been talked about previously, or had rudimentary work, but SpaceX is flying two (soon three) and committed to the FFSC and cutting (or is that printing?) metal.
« Last Edit: 10/18/2014 11:19 am by docmordrid »
DM

Offline MP99



I wonder if there's any chance of operating this as a nuclear light bulb - perhaps a film of 1H providing film cooling.
Cheers, Martin

The jacket would need to be transparent to thermal energy.
Could we make one of pure quartz? I don't know.
If we could then an isp of 10,000 would be achievable and we wouldn't need to sacrifice thrust for it.
But that would be a hard engineering project because it couldn't have any imperfections at all.
If it did the whole jacket would vaporize and destroy the engine.
Perhaps one day we will be able to 3d-print a proof-of-concept jacket, laying down a single molecule per layer.
Any of you young engineers out there willing to tackle this for your thesis?

Chuck &  alexterrel,

As I understand the principle of operation of this reactor, the plasma is hot only because it is heated from an external source. It is not, itself, a source of high temperature exhaust gas (now realise I used the wrong justification for my comment on this in the previous post) it is simply a power drain.

The heat flux comes from neutrons, which provide usable heat only when they slam into the atoms of the surrounding jacket. It is recovery of this heat that would provide the energy for propulsion.

A fusion light bulb operating on this principle would need to have the surrounding layer of 1H be sufficient to capture these neutrons *instead* of allowing them through to deposit their energy in the jacket. The plasma is already constrained by the magnetic fields, so no physical "glass" is required.

Which, now I think of it, seems completely impractical. Perhaps heavy nuclei would be better for this (xenon, and its ilk?), but still seems impractical to have a jacket of propellant that's thick enough to capture the neutrons, but used sparingly enough to provide high Isp.

Whichever way you look at it, it seems that material properties - either meeting point of jacket material, or rate of absorption of neutrons - will severely hamper Isp of this as a rocket. Simple NTR with 1H may be best that can be achieved.

The real benefit here may be 900s Isp on the outbound leg, then leave the reactor on the ground and just don't recover the MCT/whatever.

P11B with non-physical capture of *charged* fusion fragments sounds like it has hugely more potential, but is *much* harder.

Cheers, Martin

Offline sanman

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So I'd somewhere (thespacereview.com maybe?) that one of the advantages of these small-scale efforts towards fusion power is that because they're not as expensive as tokamaks and laser ignitiion facilities, that there are many such experimental efforts going on, each potentially nibbling away and making their own tiny incremental progress.

Does this new Lockheed-Boeing approach sort of try to bring some of that mentality towards somewhat bigger fusion apparatus setups? It sounds like they'll be churning out these machines off an assembly line, thus enabling more fusion experiments of that sophistication level to be conducted at lower cost.

In which case, who will the immediate customers for these devices be? Will universities and other labs be queuing up to buy these machines from Lockheed-Boeing?

Offline ChrisWilson68

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Is this LM upper management learning from Elon Musk that grand visions and inspiring hopeful technology projects have real present benefits?

Is this the sort of announcement that would have been more conditional and modest sounding before Musk showed that talking about putting a million colonists on Mars didn't do any harm and rather helped him in attracting the best young talent and dealing with Congress?

I think you misunderstand what separates Elon Musk from traditional aerospace companies and government programs.  It's not that Musk has grand visions.  It's the approach he takes to achieve those grand visions.  In particular, Musk focuses on cost and using proven technologies over pushing the technological edge.
>

Where do supersonic retropropulsion, printing very powerful thrusters, flying printed LOX valves, and a full-flow staged combustion engone fit into the not-bleeding edge theory?

Yes - several have been talked about previously, or had rudimentary work, but SpaceX is flying two (soon three) and committed to the FFSC and cutting (or is that printing?) metal.

Here's the thing -- SpaceX didn't rely on any of those things to get a working system.  They started out taking very basic technology and making it work, with a path to upgrade to a reusable system.  And they've been steadily working up to that reusable system with a minimum of new technology to make it work.

Two of the items you listed are printing parts.  That's not SpaceX developing new technology, that's SpaceX taking technology that is new but mature and applying it to their program.  Their architecture doesn't depend on it, it's an incremental improvement through the application of a new, mature technology that others developed.

A third item you mentioned it supersonic retropropulsion.  SpaceX is only doing that because they see it as the simplest way to get to cheap re-use.  And they're doing it with simple, cheap engines that they already developed and use for their expendable launch business.

Your final point is about a full-flow staged combustion engine.  But note that SpaceX has kept that off the critical path to get reusability working.  They're going to get reusability working with their simpler engines.  The more advanced engines are for future scaling of the concept.  Also, they didn't invent the idea of such engines -- others have done them before.

I wasn't saying SpaceX isn't developing anything new.  I was saying that they focus on low cost and simplicity and avoiding unproven technologies.  It's not that they will never use a new technology, it's just that they limit it to where it's absolutely necessary for their goals, or as an incremental improvement that is consistent with their low cost goals.

Offline sanman

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So anyway, back to the fusion thing - will Lockheed-Martin's new announcement significantly accelerate the research efforts for magnetic fusion confinement? Will they have any spinoff benefits for other types of fusion research?

Offline QuantumG

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Are they publishing?
Human spaceflight is basically just LARPing now.

Offline Robotbeat

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I see no evidence that this is significantly further along than other reasonably-funded alt-fusion projects. The only difference I see is that of Lockheed-Martin's marketing department.
Chris  Whoever loves correction loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid.

To the maximum extent practicable, the Federal Government shall plan missions to accommodate the space transportation services capabilities of United States commercial providers. US law http://goo.gl/YZYNt0

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