http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysic...11,%202013.pdf
FF-1 ion beam output jumps four-fold to a record 380-GW
The ion beam produced by a plasma focus device will be the primary means of getting electric
power out of the device. On February 28, while firing Focus Fusion-1 (FF-1), LPP’s
experimental plasma focus device, the team observed a record 380 GW peak power in the ion
beam. The previous most powerful beam observed had a peak power of 93 GW, so the new beam
is a four-fold improvement. In addition, this was the first beam observed that, at least in part,
went all the way down the meter-long drift tube that is attached to the underside of the FF-1
vacuum chamber. It was also the first beam that equaled or exceeded our theoretical predictions.
Both the higher peak power and the beam’s more vertical direction are signs of increasing
symmetry of the compression that forms the plasmoid, a key goal of LPP’s current efforts.
To give some context for this large power output, the peak input power to FF-1 device from its
capacitor bank is currently around 53 GW while the total average electric power used in the
United States is 440GW. Indeed, the beam was probably considerably more powerful than the
figure we measured, as LPP’s Chief Scientist Eric Lerner calculated that about half the beam
spread out beyond the 1-cm wide entrance hole to the drift tube. We believe this is the most
powerful beam ever measured from a plasma focus device, although we will have to search the
literature more thoroughly to make that claim with certainty.
Of course, the beam only lasted 5-ns, so it and the equally powerful electron beam emitted in the
opposite direct carried only about 4 kJ of energy, about 1/15th of the total energy fed into the
electrodes during the much longer 2-microsecond rise-time of the current from the capacitors. To
get more energy out of the beam than is put in will require much higher fusion yield than is
presently obtained in FF-1.