CQ CQ CQ

[Steven Krivit]

Dear Vortices,

I had a long talk with plasma physicist yesterday.

I had been confused about the comparison of measuring energy in HF vs CF.

I'd like to share what I came up with as an understanding and see if there are any disagreements or comments.

I'll get to the bottom line first. It seems that people in CF use a different "accounting" method than those in HF.



In CF, of one considers an experiment that consumes 10 watts of electrical energy in, and it shows 11 watts of heat energy out, then one normally writes that as 10% excess power.

In HF, they'll put 10MW in to heat up the tokamak, and get 6.7MW of "fusion energy" out, in the form of alpha and neutron emission. Their total energy out then, is 16.7MW.

They call this Q=0.67

In CF-type accounting, this would be considered 67% excess power.

In HF-type accounting, they would call the calculations from the CF cell above as showing Q=0.10


Steve