Nick_Barsley – FirstPrinciples.Energy

Trouble with Difstak 63 :-(

Today I disassembled the Edwards Difstak 63. There was a lot of deposits of blackened oil built up inside, so I thought I would use oven cleaner to clean it up. This proved to be a big mistake, the over cleaner dissolved the metal… I had assumed it was stainless, but perhaps it was aluminium? The top of it is now massively corroded and I suspect has lost several important dimensions. It might still work, but I don’t want to take the chance.

To resolve the issue, I’ve drawn up in CAD today (Fusion 360) a replacement part. I’m 3D printing it to check fit, and then will ask a prototyping shop to create a stainless version for me. Likely quite an expensive mistake!

In other news, quite a few deliveries have come in for the various parts.Vacuum system-wise things are progressing well, with pumps/adapters/sensors now received. On the computer control, the Raspberry Pi is talking happily to the pressure sensors, so I will have feeds of pressure data.

One of the most significant things to think through is HV power supply. There seem three basic choices; 1) build a heavy duty transformers and rectification under oil, 2) build a switching power supply, 3) purchase a supply (either fully to spec, or not quite to spec and modify it). Lots of research to do on which option to go for…

Culham Innovation Center

We’re getting set up to produce our first series of educational content on physics. The first build we will be filming is a Farnsworth Fusor – where we will describe each step of the physics, and each step of the design (open sourcing all software and design calculations).

Excitingly, thanks to Culham Innovation Center (https://www.culham-ic.co.uk), we are getting set up amongst a range of start ups in the energy and fusion space. More details to follow soon 🙂

Our first video on two stage rotary vacuum pumps and diffusion pumps will be posted in early August as we test our first components out for the build. In additional, we will show how to talk to a pressure sensor via RS232; an MKS901P pressure transducer.

The landscape of isotopes

I’ve now got plot.ly and r working well and have started to explore the data set I created in the last post. Below is a chart showing neutron vs. proton count in isotopes, colour coded with the natural abundance of the isotope. Next up, I’ll be calculating the delta between observed mass and predicted mass for each isotope.

Isotope Database

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")

Site launched

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.