It’s clear from the inconclusive results of the symmetry test that our experimental apparatus isn’t durable enough. It needs to for a long period of time over the course of many trials, without breaking. Every time it breaks, we need to open up the chamber and fix it. In doing so, we inevitably make some slight change to the alignment of the components, the material makeup of the assembly, etc. Each of these changes introduces unknowns. This makes it difficult to compare the results of one set of trials to another, and thus difficult to accumulate the date we need to actually demonstrate something conclusively. To make matters worse, we aren’t getting deep vacuums because the much of the plastic and rubber components of the assembly are out-gassing.

It’s as though instead of running one experiment a thousand times, we run a hundred slightly different experiments ten times each.

In a word, the three main problems with the old polywell assembly are alignment, structural integrity, and vacuum compatibility. I designed a new assembly which should remedy these problems. instead of multiple separate components, it will be one solid piece of 3D printed ceramic which include a core, acclerator anode, hot cathode, and langmuir probe, all bolted to the 8” conflat flange:

Close-up of the hot cathode holder:

The cathode holder is actually two pieces which sandwich two 2o mm lengths of 10-gauge solid copper wire between them into the inside grooves (A). The grooves on the outside of the cathode holder accept zip ties which will hold the copper wires firmly in place (B). Once the wires are secured, the whole thing is put into place against the left column, and another zip tie is slipped through the hole (C) on the extreme left of the cathode holder and looped around the column. This connection will be strong enough to prevent the cathode holder from moving during setup/normal operation. A light bulb filament, serving as the cathode itself, is soldered to the ends of the copper wires.

Close-up of the anode holder:

The anode, a copper cylinder, is put into the crescent moon shaped space (A), and a zip tie goes around it and through the hole (B), and secures it to the assembly.

Langmuir probe holder:

The langmuir probe fits int the groove in the cylinder (A), and attached with a zip tie or perhaps teflon tape. It extends into the center of the core, indicated by the blue sphere (B). The cylinder is oriented and positioned such that the langmuir probe will extend into the center of the core.

Here’s the new langmuir probe:

The new langmuir probe is a strand of wire inside a very thin ceramic tube. The 9-volt battery on the right is for scale.

Core

The coils fit into the cavities in the core, and then covers go over them. The covers will be secured with zip ties or perhaps hose clamps.

Other than the zip ties and wires, all of this will be made of ceramic. The zip ties will be made of tefzel, a strong, heat tolerant, and highly vacuum compatible material similar to teflon. All wire insulation will be teflon. This assembly will be heat resistant, electrically insulating, and much more rugged than previous designs. Ideally, we will be able to put it together, put it into the chamber, pump down to much deeper vacuum, and do hundreds of trails without anything breaking. moving, or changing shape.

In order to work at all, this design has to be compatible with the vaccum chamber and conflats that we already had. If one dimension is even slightly off, then the whole thing fails. To prevent that, I first took measnurements of the chamber and flange, and maodeled exact copies of them in OpenSCAD, and built this assembly inside the chamber :

Here you can see the conflat flange (left) and the chamber. Notice that the blue sphere, which indicate the center of the polywell is not centered in the chamber. By offsetting the core slightly, I was able to get more clearance between the walls of the chamber and the core, which in turn allowed for a larger coil radius.

Another pic of the whole thing:

While I have uploaded these models to shapeways, they will probebly not be the ones we actually have printed. This is more of a first draft.

The source code is here

Domenick Bauer