October 2016 – FirstPrinciples.Energy

One of the first elements I’ll be writing about on this site is nuclear binding energy, and the energy that is released when two light nuclei ‘fuse’ together. To illustrate this and step through the physics, I will walk through the calculations and formulae in a post. To do that however, I wanted to pull together a data set on nuclear isotopes that a) I could run the calculations on, and b) that I could source and share.

Two sources I found here and here have two data files I combined which include the fields of: name, symbol, observed mass (important for our upcoming calculations), number of protons, number of nucleons (otherwise known as Atomic number), whether radioactive or stable, spin quantum number, nuclear g factor gn, nautral abundance, and electric quadrupole moment.

You can download the resulting data file here, and the source code for the combination in r is below.

# Script to build a clean isotope database that can be used for calculations such as nuclear binding energy.

install.packages("data.table")
library(data.table)

# Load the Symbols and Observed Weights into a data table
# Sourcefile for weights here: http://www.sisweb.com/referenc/source/exactmas.htm
DF &lt;- fread("C:/Users/Nick/Documents/Projects/Project - FirstPrinciples.Energy/R/Learning R/Weights.txt")

# Set the symbol field to be the key
setkey(DF, Symbol)

# Split the 2 char string out from the symbol column
DF$StrSymbol = as.character(lapply(strsplit(as.character(DF$Symbol), split="\\("), "[", 1))
DF$A_tmp = as.character(lapply(strsplit(as.character(DF$Symbol), split="\\("), "[", 2))
DF$A = as.character(lapply(strsplit(as.character(DF$A_tmp), split="\\)"), "[", 1))
DF[, A_tmp:=NULL]

# Load the 2nd data set on isotopes including protons, stability, spin, gn, abundance and quadrupole moment
# http://easyspin.org/documentation/isotopetable.html
# Note: I removed the % lines in the field to give a r a clean import set
DTT &lt;- fread("C:/Users/Nick/Documents/Projects/Project - FirstPrinciples.Energy/R/Learning R/Nuclear_Isotope_Table")
DTT$neutrons = DTT$nucleons - DTT$protons
DTT$Symbol &lt;- paste(DTT$symbol, "(", DTT$nucleons, ")", sep="")
setkey(DTT, Symbol)

IsotopeTable = merge(DF, DTT)
IsotopeTable[, A:=NULL]
IsotopeTable[, Abund.:=NULL]

write.table (IsotopeTable, 
 file = "C:/Users/Nick/Documents/Projects/Project - FirstPrinciples.Energy/R/Learning R/IsoTope_Database")

# Script to build a clean isotope database that can be used for calculations such as nuclear binding energy.

install.packages("data.table")

library(data.table)

# Load the Symbols and Observed Weights into a data table

# Sourcefile for weights here: http://www.sisweb.com/referenc/source/exactmas.htm

DF <- fread("C:/Users/Nick/Documents/Projects/Project - FirstPrinciples.Energy/R/Learning R/Weights.txt")

# Set the symbol field to be the key

setkey(DF, Symbol)

# Split the 2 char string out from the symbol column

DF$StrSymbol = as.character(lapply(strsplit(as.character(DF$Symbol), split="\\("), "[", 1))

DF$A_tmp = as.character(lapply(strsplit(as.character(DF$Symbol), split="\\("), "[", 2))

DF$A = as.character(lapply(strsplit(as.character(DF$A_tmp), split="\\)"), "[", 1))

DF[, A_tmp:=NULL]

# Load the 2nd data set on isotopes including protons, stability, spin, gn, abundance and quadrupole moment

# http://easyspin.org/documentation/isotopetable.html

# Note: I removed the % lines in the field to give a r a clean import set

DTT <- fread("C:/Users/Nick/Documents/Projects/Project - FirstPrinciples.Energy/R/Learning R/Nuclear_Isotope_Table")

DTT$neutrons = DTT$nucleons - DTT$protons

DTT$Symbol <- paste(DTT$symbol, "(", DTT$nucleons, ")", sep="")

setkey(DTT, Symbol)

IsotopeTable = merge(DF, DTT)

IsotopeTable[, A:=NULL]

IsotopeTable[, Abund.:=NULL]

write.table (IsotopeTable,

file = "C:/Users/Nick/Documents/Projects/Project - FirstPrinciples.Energy/R/Learning R/IsoTope_Database")

Welcome to FirstPrinciples.Energy! You’re reading the first post on this nascent little site.

By way of an introduction, I’m Nick Barsley – a Cambridge University and MIT educated engineer with an MBA with distinction from INSEAD. For the last seven years I have worked in strategy for large firms – a job that really boils down to really clear structured thinking. I learnt to think this way through both the engineering, but also world-class mentorship during 5 years at The Boston Consulting Group post-MBA.

Throughout my life, I’ve had an interest in fusion power. As more and more industries are disrupted with advanced technology (whether the precipitous fall in the cost of computing power, the rise of rapid prototyping, or machine learning), I’m convinced that ALL industries are now seeing increased acceleration of development cycles.

Fusion has one of the longest development cycles of a technology that humans have embarked upon. Despite billions of $ being spent over the decades, no fusion power stations exist today.

Why is that? What makes it so hard? What are the ways we are trying to tackle it? What are the pros and cons of those avenues? What avenues aren’t being explored?

All these questions and more I hope to explore in this site over the coming years.

Month: October 2016

Isotope Database

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