🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <72055@cup.portal.com> lordSnooty@cup.portal.com (Andrew - Palfreyman) writes:
>Frank E Perdicaro writes:
>: As an interesting side light, the largest forging ever made is 
>: the largest flywheel ever that stores energy at MIT for the 
>: ALCATORC-MOD fusion reactor.  It takes like 500 hp all night to spin it up, 
>: and 3 seconds to stop when the switch is flipped.  
>: 
>: Yeah, megajoules, many of them.  If there was a quake when the thing
>: was spinning, it would remove a large section of Cambridge.  
>: 
>: Its surface speed is just below the speed of sound, and it weighs like
>: a very large steam locomotive ; and its right next to the FISSION
>: reactor..... they know there is no way to stop it if there is a quake,
>: so its just in a simple flimsy building.
>
>I have a problem with this; if v^2 ~= 1e5 (m/s)^2 and you've pumped in
>about 3MJ, the mass must be about 60Kg for a disc shape. Perhaps the speed
>is not nearly so high - this is hardly a locomotive weight!
>(Hint: use Disc Energy = 0.5m(r*w)^2 and 1hp = 764W).
>

Why would v be 1e5?  I thought the speed of sound in air was about
250 m/s, about 2.5e2.

Perhaps I got the spinup time wrong.  The thing is designed to spin
just below the speed of sound, and is a piece of Inconel something
like 6 feet thick and a dozen feet across.  It is connected to "line"
generator -- 13,600 VAC 3p.

The flywheel weighs more than the generator.

When the magnet is fired, the repulsion between the poles is enough to
bend a forged, 1 meter thick, 3 meter diameter piece of stainless
steel about 3 mm in something like a micro second.  And fuse a volume
of hydrogen.  Use that as a energy reference.

An interesting automotive aspect of this project is the plasma
production.  How do you make an arc several feet long in hydrogen?
With the worlds largest set of points!  The ballast resistor consists
of 1 meter by 2 meter sheets of 1/2" stainless sawn zig-zag, connected
by fiberglass rails.  The stack of these sheets is about 20 feet long.
The inductor is common 10" high pressure water pipe wrapped with something
like 20-O copper cable.  The capacitor(condensor)/switch(points) setup is 
about the size of my house.  The ballast resistor gains 100 Kelvins in a
millisecond.

Once the hydrogen is plasma, the switch is flipped, and something like
300,000,000 amps at 0.5 vdc goes to the magnet.

As we ( the American taxpayer ) have paid for all this, it is open to
the public by appointement.  The gallery with photos of much that I
have described is amost alwyas open.  There are some flywheel experts
around that can definitly settle this question.
-- 
	 Frank E Perdicaro, Systems Admin, etc.		Xyvision Color Systems
      Legalize guns, drugs and cash...today.		101 Edgewater Drive
   inhouse: frank@marvin, x5572				Wakefield MA
outhouse: frank@contex.com, 617-245-4100x5572		018801285