Transcribers[]
Chuck Valdez
Antony Macken
5 [check spelling of names]CV[]
== ☀RLM: OK, We'll get started. I want to welcome everybody back who was here before at our previous demonstrations and welcome all the newcomers.Hope to have you back again. This is the second year anniversary of the first time we did a demonstration showing the phenomena where we ignited water and made an enormous amount of power, predominantly in the form of light and in the intervening time we demonstrated a number of manifestations of how to commercialize that. Different engineering designs and prototypes and that culminated in a device that we showed in July 21st 2014, about 18 months ago.
Since then we have been very busy and we did a lot of work. I'm going to go through some of the trials and travails, the trajectory and different paths we took. Some led to other innovations, some led to other ideas, some were totally a waste of time. That's the way it is in science and engineering but if you pick up the pieces you learn from your mistakes or learn from designs that weren't optimal.
Our goal is to commercialize - to have something that can replace fire, that will be lasting and that can dominate in the energy industry and I think we have that. I think that we have a design that can prevail above all other systems and forms of energy and power. I believe it is the only solution to climate change, whether you believe it or not, since it does not produce any CO2. It will not produce any pollution of any form and it appears that it can work for all forms of power, for stationary and all forms of motive, and it has economic characteristics [that will allow it] to do that without necessity of support from the government. It should be totally driven by it's economics.
I want to introduce very quickly the agenda we have and the people that are running the program today. We have two teams that are setting up SunCells. They'll be running demonstrations. We have Daniel Rodriguez and Paul Allison that are behind us, behind this screen. We put that up so we wouldn't have any issues with bright lights and the like. They're going to be running their cell, a suncell, and when they have it up and running they're going to cut in and show it on the TV screen here so you don't have to wear glasses because it can get quite extraordinarily bright. Typically, when they're in there running it, they have to wear double shielded welders glasses. We didn't have glasses for everybody today so we'll show it on the monitor.
In addition, we have another team in the other lab and that's John Lotoski, Brian Ronan and Rich Frazer. They're back there getting ready and they're gonna set up their SunCell to run as well. With that , I'm going to go into the presentation. I'm gonna go through a powerpoint and we'll cut in when they have their cell running and I'll discuss that and then go back to the presentation. We'll take a Q and A at the end.
So we have a SunCell we think appropriately named and a probably familiar slide of some of the energy markets, I think the important thing is the amount that energy resources are worth, eight billi.. eight trillion dollars, you cant even talk in billions in this category and infrastructure costs of a trillion annually. ==
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== ☀Then, of course, there is a lot of talk about wind and solar and the like but it's projected to only meet fifteen percent of demand even in 2040. The energy sources that are being developed today really don't have the capacity to solve long term energy needs.
We have a new energy source. it's based on producing a new form of atomic hydrogen that reacts to form a new form of molecular hydrogen called hydrino. I'll describe it a little further, it's the dark matter of the universe. So you have the burning of hydrogen to form water while we're actually using water as the fuel source and using its hydrogen atoms to make this more stable, inert, nonreactive, dark matter form of hydrogen that releases enormous amounts of energy compared to burning.
Minimally,if you want to compare it on a volumetric basis, a hundred gallons of gasoline would be required to replace one gallon of water, and that's on a very conservative basis. So, it's clean and nonpolluting. It's commercially competitive and we have some licenses on a former design using central generation. Central generation has been viable for a hundred years but the problem with it is it's very big, it's very expensive, it requires a grid so a field trial would be many, many years and then you'd start building out more and more plants. So it would take a while to undergo a transition to this energy source [hydrino] using central gen as a primary path.
So, what we've done is we've created is an energy source that's completely autonomous to the grid and fuels infrastructure. It can be mass produced like car engines and in that case it should proliferate very, very quickly. So the cost is very competitive as I was saying, we think we can generate for under a fraction of a cent per kilowatt-hr for electricity and this compares very favorably to other forms of energy sources. Again, it also has advantage of 24-7, 365. It doesn't stop when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing.
The foundation of the technology is applying physical laws which are the pillar of our modern society. Basically it's the classical laws like Force equals the time derivative of momentum or , if you like, F=ma, the electrodynamic equations of Maxwell. Things that you can prove, things that are taught in every university in the entire world that gave us the modern technologies we have today.
As you know, or you might not know, back in the early part of the twentieth century physicists were perplexed at what the structure of the atom was, and suffice it to say , in synopsis, physicists never solved the structure of the electron. They treat it purely mathematically even today. No one can tell you what an electron looks like. In fact, they say the electron can never be identified, it doesn't even exist as a discrete structure or having a discrete energy. It's everywhere at once simultaneously, has no physical form, you can't pin it down, you can't describe what it is. It can't exist as anything that's describable, only in terms of uncertainties and probabilities and the like.
That's not true! The electron is a real physical entity. It has charge, it has mass, it's very definable with very discrete energy levels. If you apply those physical laws correctly you can solve exactly what an electron is.
[Pointing to picture of orbitsphere model]
So, this is a computer rendering of how the current is distributed in space and time that makes up the electron. These little arrows are telling you how the electron moves and how the current flows and it gives you properties of the electron with fancy names like: Lamb shift, fine structure, hyperfine structure, g- factor, lifetime of states, on and on. The physical laws solve this problem exactly. One of the things you'll see in physics books is, you'll take physics and you learn all this elegant physics and they say forget all that.
== 15 ==Now we have all this stuff at the atomic level that's pure math. And then you're thinking , well, why doesn't that work at the level of the atom because everything else is made out of atoms so why can't the atoms obey physical laws? The things that are comprised of atoms obey them. And it turns out they do. It's just that it was never solved correctly, and when you do apply those laws it's incredibly precise and predictive over 85 orders of magnitude of scale. You can solve very complicated things that you cannot solve today for example molecules in analytical expression.
[Pointing to picture of molecules]
This is dna and insulin for example. This approach solves every single electron, the atomic and molecular, and their charge distribution and every property and how it moves, how fast its moving, what it's energy is, what it's magnetic energy is, electric energy, kinetic energy, that is, the energy of motion. All those parameters are precisely known for every single point position on these molecules. It's very powerful. We have about four thousand people using this software now. It takes analytical solutions of molecules and applies it to unknowns of boundless extent and complexity and it gets it absolutely identically.
[Pointing to chart]
So here is a paper we published to verify that for precise cases. This is four hundred fifteen molecules. There's the predicted versus experimental agreement. It's a part per hundred thousand agreement. This is using an advanced program, you can't even describe what an electron is in the current paradigm but you can take numbers and crunch big numbers, they call them basis sets or semi-empirical datasets where they're basically trying to interpolate a curve to something else. And you can say quantum does an incredibly great job but then it ignores all the other cases that it does a horribly bad job.
The other thing is, quantum says you cannot , that is, quantum mechanical theory not quantum energy levels says that [pointing to equation] A psi = E psi, the electron has no physical form, it's everywhere at once, has an infinite number of energies and positions simultaneously! It says you can't image molecules but there's an image of a molecule. And there's a lot of these examples you'll find in the literature and on the internet of atomic force microscopy and here you'll see hydrogen atoms, you can see carbon-carbon bonds. This is the analytical, physical solution and it overlays identically, it gets all the bond angles and bond distances and all the parameters precisely. A picture is worth a thousand words. This picture alone disproves quantum and confirms classical theory.
A theory is really great for explaining things but it's even better when it predicts things because we use classical laws to engineer new things like energy cells , planes, trains and waveguides and power transmission systems and things like that. That's what you use theory for. We don't even think of classical laws as theory anymore. We think of it as engineering but in the days it was discovered they were quite remarkable in terms of intellectual circles, in terms of elucidating the fundamental aspects of matter and energy.
[Pointing to picture]
Here's classical law used to predict a new energy process. You have the blue guy here which is a hydrogen atom and you have an energy acceptor. Ordinarily, the hydrogen atom can't go down to a lower energy state. It can't release energy by emitting light but we all know that hydrogen can react, it can react to form water quite violently. So the electrons can go closer to the proton. That's how you get energy, the negative and positive get closer. But then the question is why doesn't the electron itself get closer to the proton on it's own without reacting with something else. It turns out it can for the specific case of the hydrogen atom. In particular, the negative charged electron, [pointing to picture] this blue soap bubble here can get closer to that center proton by transferring energy radiationlessly to this yellow guy. The amount of energy that is transferred in that particular reaction is very high.
== 20
☀It's higher than the ionization energy of any known atom. Helium is 24.59 while the energy transfer is integer [multiple] of 27.2. So this reaction, the energy accepting reaction has to result in ions and electrons. So there's an energy transfer, you create an intermediate state, a meta stable state and then the electron is going to be attracted because of that energy transfer it's going to be attracted more tenaciously, greater strength of attraction and it's going to drop to a smaller radius and release additional energy.
That is different than an excited state relaxing. Electrons can absorb energy, light, and go to a higher energy level and then drop back down and get the light. This is a different process. And because of that it's irreversible and because of the way the energy is released in this second step you end up with continuum radiation that has a cutoff.
The highest energy of that radiation is the difference between that meta-stable intermediate and the final stable hydrogen [hydrino] atom. It turns out.. I want to show you this. [pointing to video] This is the reaction of atomic hydrogen to a lower energy state and that is enormously powerful kinetics. So, what we wrestled with or we dealt with for many, many years is getting the reaction rate up fast because you get a lot of energy from this but its a very, very slow reaction. and then the question was why was this a slow reaction and the reason is because the nature of the mechanism. You're transfering energy to an acceptor and it's ionizing.
We all know if you walk across the rug on a dry day like today when the heats on you get charged up and you get electrically shocked. Well you don't get charged up forever or your arm would burn off there'd be so much current going through it. Luckily, you're energy level gets higher the more you get charged up so you don't get charged up to infinity like a Van de Graaf generator and let off a lightening bolt and kill your wife or something [chuckle].
So it turns out it's limiting cause that energy change stops the chemical reaction we're talking about, so it's self limiting. What we are applying now is a condition where- there's two ways you can do it- condition to alleviate that charge.
One is you make an arc current. An arc current actually lowers the energy the higher the current. Typically, the energy gets higher the higher the current but this is actually the opposite case. It's a different state of matter. It's like lightning. The more current, the lower the voltage, the lower the energy of the system. It self reinforces itself with positive feedback.
The other way is you can make a highly conductive matrix where the electrons are absorbed on highly conductive metal particles or they're conducted away in such a fashion. And when you do that as I'm showing-
[looks to video of slow motion hydrino reaction]
-you get explosive kinetics. Explosive. I mean like incredibly off the chart power density. Thousands of, millions times more than internal combustion engine. If you look at what the power is and how small that volume is [that was detonated on video].. enormous power density. So the trick is, and this is what we were showing back two years ago, that flash of light is essentially the entire amount of power being released from that reaction.
There's very little pressure-volume work or at least we can design it so there's little pressure-volume work. Pressure-volume work is like an internal combustion engine where you fire a spark in the gasoline and it builds up gas pressure and it pushes a piston and it does mechanical work.
In this case we can take light and the idea is to convert that light into electricity using photovoltaic cells which they've already spent about a trillion dollars developing. So its very convenient. There's two problems with this. Well, there's more than two, but there's two main problems with this. One, you have to fire and sustain that reaction at a thousand times per second and this reaction is triggered by an arc current which is a lot of current. It's hard to switch a lot of current very fast. Then you have to inject at a thousand times per second. You have to recirculate, you have to regenerate the fuel at a thousand times per second. All very challenging engineering obstacles.
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The other problem is, as I'll show you, the light you're seeing is only a very small fraction of the light. Almost all the light is in what they call soft x-ray, extreme ultraviolet, vacuum ultraviolet region and photovoltaic cells don't respond to that. It's too high in energy. It's like your eye can't even see it. So it's like your eye is like a photovoltaic cell in terms of the region of the electromagnetic spectrum, or the frequencies of light, to which it is responsive.
So we have a way of addressing both of those problems. As I was saying, as the hydrogen atom goes down to a lower energy level you get continuum soft x-ray light.
[Pointing at spectrum]
So this is an arc plasma discharge and as I was saying, in between the intermediate and the final energy state the highest energy is 122.4 electron volts [eV]. That's about a hundred times typical chemical reactions and you can see it's all wavelengths. Compared to these lines, these oxygen ion lines, this is all wavelengths. It's a continuum band. Very different.
That radiation is also seen coming from all over the sky from space from everywhere. And no one really knows the origin and it's an enormous amount of energy. You're seeing ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet of precisely that form from all over the sky. Another enigma this black or dark ring, non light emitting ring, is identified as dark matter. You can identify it as dark matter because it has enormous gravitational effect but there is no light being emitted and you can tell that because you have galaxies here that are somewhat oblate and if you move the telescope they will disappear. So they're being gravitationally lensed from other regions of the universe. So you have gravity but no absorption or emission of light. That's dark matter.
This other emitting material and absorbing material is ordinary hydrogen. Stars are made of ordinary hydrogen. Essentially everything in the universe is ordinary hydrogen but that's only about one percent of the mass that's out there. The rest is hydrogen in a more chemically stable state. It's the hydrino form of hydrogen. So what we're doing is taking hydrogen, making the dark matter form of hydrogen. It's emitting very high energy ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet light and that's what you're seeing coming from all over space. It's the same same light.
It's also ionizing the gases around the sun so the sun looks like it's two million degrees and it's really not. You have carbon monoxide molecules in the gases around the sun is not two million degrees. It is not being ionized by thermal effects, it's being ionized by this soft x-ray light emitted by this process. In fact, our cell looks like the surface of the sun when you play it in slow motion. It has the same temperature as the sun. It's the same phenomena occurring. The surface of the sun is the temperature of our cell. It's around five thousand to six thousand degrees kelvin. And the gases around the sun get ionized just like the gases in our cell get ionized.
You can get highly ionized ions because the high energy light is being produced. And that's a good thing because you can take the high energy light and you can convert it into visible wavelengths that you can convert with conventional concentrator photovoltaic cells. There's a lot of analytical tests we've done. These are what chemists know as different instruments to identify signatures of molecules and atoms. We've done more than about twelve analytical tests. This is one of them. Here's a new peak here that occurs after we run this cell. This is the rotational energy of the molecular hydrino that's called H2(1/4). The particular catalyst we're using creates this molecule as a final product.
[30 minutes]
More examples of that.
[Shows other spectra]
And then the molecule can vibrate and rotate and you can get transitions between those different energy levels. These are the calculated and experimental in this table with relative difference. You can see here that this is absolutely reproducible. We've done this in multiple labs including the instrument manufacturer. There's nothing known to man that matches that spectrum. It's an extraordinarily high energy region. There's no other material in the universe that makes that spectrum. There's nothing you can confuse it with. All the peaks match identically.
The other thing we can do is we can do x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and we get a new peak here. This has been done at multiple leading universities, state of the art instruments, their computers cannot assign this peak. Its a new peak. It's identified [detected?] after we run our reaction and it matches identically the total binding energy of the new molecule that we are forming. That was predicted and it matches experimental observation. There's multiple examples of this, how we can take the characteristics for this new molecule and prove by analytical instrumentation that that's what we are making in the cell.
So, we saw the individual blast that lasts about a thousandth of a second. If we can fire those at a thousand times a second we would have continuous radiation. Now obviously we didn't have the mechanism or engineering to do that, but to prove the principle we would fire them on a mechanical belt. We basically put them on a mechanical system, fired them and then converted that light into electricity then converted the electricity into a diode emitting light. So there's the blast.
[Plays slow motion blast]
The idea is to take that blast and convert it into electricity using photovoltaic cells which everybody is familiar with and then here is the application. [watching video]. Pretty straight forward. That's where we were about eighteen months ago. We advanced a little further, we increased the rate, make the system where it had the potential to recirculate and I'll go through what those different approaches were.
So, one of them was back in July 21st [2014] we were running this thing called a slurry pump and we had in here a titanium/water mixture and we had roller electrodes that were energized with a high current, ten thousand amps. Every time the slurry went through it, it would put a pulse of ten thousand amps through it. Here it's converting the light into electricity and then lighting up a diode. It looked really promising. The only point [issue?] was that titanium reacts with water and it reacts with oxygen. So we run it under argon, takes care of the second problem.
The reaction with water a little more difficult. The kinetics for that reaction, in a millisecond you don't get much water reaction with the titanium but over time you do form oxides of titanium. The idea was to run a hydrogen atmosphere. Hydrogen plasma is known to reduce [oxide of] titanium [TiO2] to TiO which is the single oxide form of titanium and that is as conductive as titanium metal. Fortuitously, it's very unique in that regard. The problem was the reaction wouldn't work with TiO. So we had to innovate new fuels and new techniques. So on to the next one.
The next one was we did a hydrated solid fuel powder and we used pneumatic injection. We fed that with counter-rotating auger so then the pitch is mirror images of each other so it pushes the powder into the middle and then there is pneumatic injectors, [pointing to photo] there's a line coming down here, here's the roller electrodes, here's another line, these two lines blew air down into the bottom of this trough and then the powder would pneumatically get injected between those roller electrodes.
[35 minutes]
☀Here's another closeup, here's the auger, over here you can see the helix. One more. So these are the two gas lines that are blowing into this powder fuel and the auger is pushing it up into a mound and you can see particles here that are being blown up pneumatically. this is it running. We're running pneumatic motors because of the inherent variation of the fuel feed caused the computer driven servo motors to go out of synchrony. So these were fail-safe motors for this particular device. You can see it wasn't that bright. There's ten thousand amps going into it. Not a lot of light.
Then the idea was to capture the powder with a cyclone separator and a pneumatic air flow system. This is the cyclone separator here so it would go back into there and the fuel would be recovered and get rehydrated, go back in the auger and we'd have a closed loop. The problem was it just did not ignite very powerfully.
So the next thing we tried, I thought it was a very clever idea, this is silver being dripped into water. If you're gonna get a thousand blasts per second you have to make a thousand fuel loads per second so you need to make a thousand fuel samples per second. This has got the capability of making a thousand fuel shots per second. So you go back to that original belt idea we had... and you say well, we were getting really really great power out of this so if you could make a thousand shots per second then you could run that type of system which we know makes incredible amounts of power. This system actually does that. You could have multiple drippers and easily make thousand fuel pellets.
The other thing is, not many people probably know this, is that water actually dissolves into the molten silver and it's almost perfect in the time frame and the temperature we run it to load it up with the right amount of water for this reaction to work so it automatically regenerates itself, it's extraordinarily conductive and water doesn't react with silver. It [silver] doesn't even react with oxygen at the temperature we're running it so it's absolutely perfect for a fuel. No chemical reactivity at all. It's the most conductive element and its' very easy to make shots for injecting into the system at a thousand per second. Sounds great!
[Pointing to photo] We have an auger feed here, we have a pneumatic injector and here's our roller electrodes. One problem. Look at the surface of the roller electrodes. I mean, this is minor. It would blow enormously big holes in the roller electrodes. So here's the pneumatic shooter coming up here. So two issues I'll show you in a second.
This is where we went to a slip ring so we had to have the electrical contact with this rotating shaft so we came up with a really good solution for that. We solved our powering problems with the variation in the torque when we shot these by putting these belts on and these tighteners. The torque would vary and the motors would go out of synchronization, many many problems and we put this on springs so it would take some of the impact. Very elegant engineering, works really great.
Two issues. We found that rather than using ten thousand amps we could use pulses with much lower current. That would make it more efficient and cause less damage to the electrodes. Many benefits from that. So we had an engineering firm, very well renown, capable engineering firm, designed an ignition source that would fire high current at very high frequency and control it with programmable logic controllers and software and the like.
[40 minutes]
And then we added pneumatic injection and Ta daa! It works. The only problem is this is about two or three times per second. It's not a thousand times per second. It's very very difficult to pneumatically, mechanically inject those shots. We looked at all kinds of ways of doing that but it's very challenging and the electrodes ended up getting extremely damaged.
The other issue is, [pointing to picture] you can see this is really big! This is a guy standing here. An engineer, and here he is here. This is real big. We wanted to go for cars so that looks a little too big to put into a car.
Why would you want to go for cars? There's sixty million cars made a year and each one of those cars would be about three hundred thousand watts. That's like twenty trillion watts [combined] so if you get into car production there is enough car production in terms of electrical replacement capacity to replace the grid in about ten days. So that is very important to have capacity. That drives the cost down, it gives you the suppliers and supply chain and all the parts. It's the way to go if you really want to do this economically and proliferate it very quickly because cars can be used for other things.
Right now a car engine only lasts about two thousand hours and it's burning gasoline and making pollution and it's really not set up to make electricity but if you had something that made hundreds of thousands of [watts] electricity you could plug it into this building for example. You could call up "Uber Electric" rather than "Uber Car" and they would come over and on the spot they would give you a lot of electricity.
That's very powerful because you get several thousand cars you could power up a whole city like in a parking garage. You don't need transmission lines, central power plants, fuel infrastructure, pollution and the like. A car could make hundreds of thousands of revenue so you look at your car payment and you say hmmm, OK, I owe two fifty but I'm getting like ten thousand a month here or more selling electricity. That's pretty good!
OK, so this is the energy balance and to give you an idea of how powerful this is for motive, a liter of water will take you well over a thousand miles and you can pull that out of the atmosphere so there's no problem running out of electricity in an electric vehicle. So like I was saying, this is incredibly more powerful than the internal combustion engine. You can have extreme power so you don't have to sacrifice power or range to have a non-polluting electric vehicle and you can make money off of it. So it seemed like the thing to do.[design with car market in mind]
So we went to, I think, a very elegant [design]. There's a lot of engineering, there's a lot of material science in this and is something that I think is really really sophisticated and it works really great. The big power supply was replaced with super capacitors. The injector is an electromagnetic pump which is injecting molten silver. It has no moving parts and they're out in the field sixty years maintenance free. All this stuff is super cheap. In fact, all this stuff is insignificant compared to the photovoltaic converter part and in production we get the number of suns up around two thousand or so, you're looking at on the order of fifty dollars a kilowatt. I mean, this could be very very cheap, this system.
[pointing at diagram] So you got a super capacitor ignition system, busbars carrying the current in, you got tungsten electrodes that don't melt till 3500 degrees Centigrade and they're extremely extremely hard and they're igniting molten silver which covers them and they don't get destroyed.
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☀There's cooling we put on this to take away the heat, I don't have all those details in here. Start it up, there's an inductively coupled heater, this red is the antenna, this is the power source. This could be super cheap. This is all DC electronics. There's DC current you can run off the PV converter up here and you put current into this busbars and they run current across these tabs through this pipe which has the molten metal in it. There's magnetic fields from magnetic cicuits on either side of this which I'll show the detail and that combination of magnetic field and the electric current that's being run through this pipe with the molten silver pumps the silver up through the nozzle into the electrodes, you get the ignition and the light fills this chamber.
That's basically it. There's some chillers which I'll show you. We have a more simplified version, we just use a car radiator. Showing some more details,this is a magnetic circuit, magnets come in here and here. Current goes here, magnetic field through here and we get a force that pumps the metal up you can see it here and up through the electrodes.When the molten metal goes between the electrodes that's the switch to switch it on for the capacitors, the super capacitors to discharge current into the silver and it ignites the fuel.
So you don't need a big switch and we typically fire this up to two thousand times. It's capable, based on the response time of the capacitor circuit of ten thousand times per second. In addition we have gases,where we have water and hydrogen feed, we can put one or both in there. You need water for sure but you could add hydrogen optionally.
This is showing some of the cooling where we're cooling the magnets for the EM pump. This antenna also is a hollow copper coil that goes to a water pump and then rejects heat into this radiator. So once we get this going we have to remove heat from the reservoir that injects the metal so that serves a dual purpose, these are the caps, the electrodes have cooling on them as well and this is the cooling system for the PV, photovoltaic converter.
Showing more detail of that. This is more detail of the magnetic circuit, there's cooling systems inside here, this is a cooling coil and then this is the inlet and outlet of that. There's a magnet in here. It's a permanent magnet so there's no electrification there. This is a yoke, a material like high purity iron that can go to very very high temperatures relative to magnets without losing it's magnetization. So this conducts the magnetic field through this yoke and into the pump tube.
So this is the pump tube. The magnet is here on the z-axis. The current is coming here, say, on the y-axis or in the transverse plane. So current comes in on these busbars, runs through this pump tube that has molten silver in it. The magnetic field here is perpendicular and then perpendicular to both the current and the magnetic field you get a force that's called the Lorentz force that pumps and moves the silver through the pipe.
And then this is the cooling system for the magnets. This is the yoke and this is the permanent magnets down here. So this is what it looks like when it is heated up. Here we're using an inductively coupled heater to heat some silver and we're pumping it to test the pump. This is what it looks like when its hooked up to the Suncell. You have the inductively coupled heater. These are the water cooling for that. We have water cooling down here for the magnets and the pump. So there's a reservoir here that has the silver in it and it goes down in this pump and gets injected up into this chamber up top where the plasma is created and the light is emitted. So what they're doing for the demo is, we would normally use in a commercial setup, we would use the photovoltaic output. That is, the electricity from the photovoltaic converter to run the inductively coupled heater to start it up and to run the EM pump and the ignition system.
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☀What we're using now 'cause we don't have that hooked up, is we're using a Matsusada twelve hundred amp, ten volt power supply for both. It's a very, very low voltage system. This is the glove box where these guys are working and they have a SunCell in there where they're melting the silver and starting up the pump and getting ready for the ignition. This is what an electromagnetic pump looks like. So you can see you can vary the current. This is the electrodes. There's no electricity on the busbars or the electrodes. These are tungsten electrodes. You turn on the current to the EM pump with the permanent magnets and voila! You get beads of silver and if you look at it in slow motion there's little beads of molten silver going up through the electrodes.
You can make it higher or lower pressure flow. You just change the current. Very controllable. So then you put the power on the ignition system and you get very very bright light. That is what we call the ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet mode. The light is comprised of essentially all high energy light. What you're seeing is a very very small fraction of the light that is actually being produced.
[Pointing to spectra] This is a quantitative spectroscopy. We have spectrometers that go all the way from soft x-ray out to far infrared even down to very very high time resolution, all the way down to ten millionths of a second. We can record the spectrum and quantify how much light there is. This is looking at the actual emission from that reaction. Almost all of it is shorter than 300 nanometers. Blue light that your eye can see, the limit of it is down around 400 nanometers. Almost all the light is in this high energy region.
So to give you an idea, here's the photovoltaic cells, they'll even go down and get some ultraviolet but you can see at 300 nm they are nonresponsive. They go to lower energy, longer wavelength light. So we transition that light from the ultraviolet, extreme ultraviolet to what we call blackbody mode or blackbody light. It starts out with the high energy soft x-ray light and converts over to blackbody light.
In this system we're gonna inject molten silver. These are the capacitors that fire between these electrodes. We're gravity feeding silver between tungsten electrodes. What we observe is there is a window on this. High energy light, soft x-ray light will not go through typical spectroscopic windows. It's cut off. So the shortest wavelength of any window known is magnesium fluoride or sapphire. They can go down to about this region. Magnesium fluoride can go to 150 and sapphire is around 180. We're using a sapphire window but we're getting part of that short wavelength spectrum and the rest of it would be in this direction. You can see there is line emission and there's essentially all shortwave light and then it's being converted very very incrementally to this smooth curve which is called blackbody light. All frequencies.
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☀What's really remarkable about it is the blackbody has a cutoff even shorter than 220 nm. So it's very, very hot. That corresponds to between 5000 and 6000 degrees Kelvin. The surface of the sun is the same temperature. So this is the transition. It starts out with the short wavelength light and converts over to the high energy, very, very hot! So it's going from high energy light to very, very hot blackbody and it's very high energy as well in terms of the blackbody temperature.
This is a glovebox. This is about the size of a person. This is big! This is not some microscopic cell. The smoke or vapor there is molten silver vaporizing. That takes enormous amount of power. So we're vaporizing an enormous amount of silver in that case. So you can see it's extraordinarily bright white light that can be converted into electricity using conventional PV.
So this is another example of that. That was gravity fed from the top and we also have, ... this is the electromagnetic pump injection. Same phenomena. We have line emission. Essentially, all high energy cutoff by the window. High energy light being converted to blackbody light that has a very high blackbody temperature. I'll explain what the temperature means in a second, in terms of photovoltaic conversion. This is being injected from the bottom with the electromagnetic pump.
Now, there's no microwave here, there's no high voltage, this is plasma being created at atmospheric pressure that's filling that entire chamber. That is enormous amount of power! There's no energy source that can be responsible for that. As I was showing before with the blast, the initial blast was a millisecond- ... [hears sound of SunCell in next room] OK,they're running back there now. We'll just interrupt [the lecture] and let them run the cell.
[Watching live SunCell demo on video]
RLM: The smoke is the silver vaporizing. They're just running it open so you can see inside of it.
Audience member: "What is that buzzing?"
RLM: "It's the firing frequency."
[60 minutes]
Audience member: "What frequency of injection do we have here, five thousand?"
RLM: "Two thousand."
[SunCell reaction wanes]
RLM: [to SunCell team] Do you want to shut it down? Do you want to go more? It's up to you... OK, we'll go a little more then get back to the lecture.
[SunCell brightens back up for another minute then subsides]
RLM: OK guys, do you want to turn it down? Or do you want to keep going? Alright, we'll get back to the lecture.
So that's the sun! The sun in a bottle!! [Dr. Mills with a big smile, audience applauds]
RLM: [to SunCell team] Very good! Thank you, guys. So that was brilliant! Good job.
Alright, so this is another example. I believe this one is on our web. You can see them in the glovebox working. It starts out UV mode and then.. so this is more or less what we were witnessing live. Some of the work we did previously. It gives me a little chance to explain it.
So when you see these energetic particles coming out here that's really from the power of the reaction. The voltage here is extremely small, less than one volt. There's no electric field in here at all. There is no microwave in here and it is literally making the entire volume incredibly powerful plasma. I'll tell you how incredibly powerful
I'll show you the blackbody curve. That blackbody curve corresponds to about thirty six million watts per square meter at that temperature. That's a law of physics. You can use something called the Stefan-Boltzmann equation and if emissivity is one that's thirty six million watts. Now, emissivity is probably not one but even if you take the lowest emissivity imaginable at those temperatures you're looking at millions of watts per square meter for that reaction. It's extremely, extremely powerful. So you see it's vaporizing enormous amounts of silver. So I'll come back to that issue, how we run this in a continuous manner for many many years.
[65 minutes]
So you can see here the electrodes are perfectly intact. They are tungsten and they are extremely durable. Let’s go back to our engineering design so you can appreciate this.
[Pointing to SunCell diagram]
We have this open and … here [pointing to table] we actually have the parts here…[back to diagram] There’s an outer, what we call cell chamber and an inner chamber that we call the reaction cell chamber and then there is a dome that is a radiator. We can insulate this part of the cell [sides and bottom] so that essentially all the power goes to this top blue dome. That blue dome can be tungsten and get to, we want to run it at 3500 degrees Kelvin. Then there’s a gap between that top dome and the photovoltaic cells and the radiation traverses across that gap so you have the secondary radiator.
So we’re making blackbody radiation five to six thousand degrees Kelvin in here. That’s actually a little bit too high. That’s making light in the ultraviolet so we would lose some of that light. So we’re going to make it at 3500, plus there are material constraints, so the ideal would be running this at 3500 degrees Kelvin using materials like carbon or tungsten, we have a carbon cone reaction vessel in that chamber [on table], and then having the light secondarily radiate to the PV panels. So it’s seeing pure light just like an enormous light bulb.
If you look at the filament of an incandescent light bulb, imagine that spread over, say, two tenths of a square meter radiating to PV panels. The reason I say two tenths of a square meter is because if the outside emissivity, which we can control, is one, then a 3500 degree blackbody radiates about eleven million watts per square meter. So it’s very easy to get hundreds of thousands if not millions of watts from a very small area to radiate to PV panels.
Now, PV panels, the concentrator type, I’ll go into some specifics, they’re running about a thousand suns in commercial designs and we have a representative from Masimo here so when we’re doing Q and A if you have any questions about concentrator PVs, he’s very happy to answer that. The idea is that our initial design would be about a thousand suns but they could go higher, for example, two thousand suns or higher. That will bring the cost down and be more commensurate with the type of power this is capable of delivering to the PV.
So this is the blackbody curve.. this is actually.. you can go online and look up blackbody calculator. This is what the profile looks like. It comes down less than 220nm here when its 5000 degrees Kelvin. That corresponds, you can see up here, to about thirty five million watts per square meter. That’s an enormous amount of power you are seeing and if we convert it to 3500 degrees Kelvin we can match this spectrum [PV sensitive range].
So we’re adjusting it a little bit, so 3,500 Kelvin is quite a good match for this visible region of the photovoltaic capability. At 3,700 Kelvin, that would have ten million watts per square meter in terms of its radiation that would be running the external dome at an emissivity of one. We would probably want to run it a little bit lower than that because that’s more power than PV can handle. There are some designs in the experimental phase that can take that kind of power. That’s about 10,000 times the sun’s intensity.
[70 minutes]
So, 2000 suns may be doable now and ultimately when you get into 10,000 suns the cost of this system could be extraordinarily small. Again, because the cost is driven by the PV, if you make the same PV produce twice the electricity it’s roughly half the cost. So this has the capability of going ten times higher concentration than what’s being run commercially today. So it’s got the potential of being extraordinarily compact, extremely powerful, and very very inexpensive. This is a device with no moving parts and could last twenty to thirty years.
[pointing to PV specs]These are some commercial products, I know these are some competitors, just to show you what’s out there. You can see here the efficiency is over forty percent at a thousand times sun concentration. And then there’s the cooling aspect. We’re designing the cooling for the cell, the electrodes, and the electromagnetic pump, the inductively coupled heater and the reservoir. So there’s that aspect we’re managing. Then the radiation goes to the PV panel. That’s commercial parts, external to us or manufactured by the photovoltaic manufacturer.
So there’s been questions about how you handle the heat if you’re only converting thirty, forty, x- percent, whatever it gets to. The rest of it is rejected as heat. But that’s something that’s already being managed, already being produced at commercial installations of millions of watts scale for solar. The concentrator PV industry uses very very large parabolic mirrors to concentrate the light to about the size of a wallet and it’s enormously intense.
We create the same light not with farms of many acres of collectors or many acres of solar panels. We have a very small reaction vessel that, incidentally, you can put in a car, a train, a plane, practically anything and it’s on site delivering power to the load, not occupying many many acres of land and it works when the sun goes down.
So then the last thing I’ll talk about is we’re working on another future design of PV because we have a high energy spectrum in the soft x-ray there are materials that are potential PV materials for converting soft x-rays or the high energy light. They’re the same kinds of materials used in blue-ray lasers and we have a very big program going on as well and this is showing you one aspect of how to run that. Right now with the silver vapor we have a contained system and we’re doing secondary radiation of the PV off a blackbody radiator.
This is another design where we make an adaptation to the cell. These are the electrodes. You can see, this way, they’re along the x-axis and we have one of these fuel pellets, silver, with water contained in this silver pellet and we’re applying a current and we’re getting ignition of that pellet. You can see the plasma debris, the molten metal and vaporized metal is being ejected along all directions along this axis. So there’s an initial flash that pretty much goes everywhere. So you can see an initial flash and then you can see the ejection debris along this axis.
If we put an electromagnetic pump on the electrodes [we get the] flash and then all the debris goes downward. So there’s no debris going upward. In this case we would cool the electrodes. We would not vaporize the silver and would control the flow of plasma downward away from the PV so we could run that under vacuum and run direct to the PV with no window and use the high energy light. So we have that program going on as well. You see that? So the plasma is not going up here as it was before. It’s all being ejected downward.
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Amack Transcribing from 105-110 [in progress]
RLM: The Sun is a blackbody, it's just very hot so it looks like all visible light.
Q. Right, so what I'm getting at this will be at an optimum rating range generating a lot of light, visible or convertible light, a minimum of heat-
RLM: We've had some modelling done, looks like 38% efficiency at 3500 Kelvin.
Q: OK
RLM: That's with the triple junction.
Q: And so what do you imagine in terms of- is there some kind of inert environment between the panels and the dome and is the heat collected at the panel? Is there a significant collection of heat at the panel from the dome?
RLM: It's the same as PV.
Q: OK
RLM: PV's getting hit with a lot of heat too. only converting 17% out in the field out there. And if you concentrate it you can concentrate it you get 40% as I showed in some of the devices, and that's sunlight. And we're making simulated Sunlight. So you should think of it just like Sunlight.
Q: Yeah ok.
RLM: It's the same fraction that will be heat in both cases.
Q.: Right okay.
New Q: How do you prevent the tungsten from slowly evaporating?
RLM: Same as they do in a halogen light bulb, put some material to suppress that. And we would probably have a maintenance item, come back and do some maintenance on it after a while. It should last a very very long time. Halogen lamps,you know they don't blacken because they have iodine, it keeps, it makes an iodine complex and it thermally decomposes on the tungsten surface and replaces it.
Cause we have that outer chamber-
Q. Is that what the vacuum pump is for?
RLM: No, the vacuum pump just to pull the gas pull the vacuum and add what gases we want. We'll put some gas that suppresses tungsten evaporation. Or we use carbon. Now the reason why they use tungsten in light bulbs is because its conductive. It's actually a really good conductor. Carbon is not that great. Remember Edison tried a carbon filament? So we could run carbon or we could run tungsten. Carbons not a great conductor but we don't need a great conductor radiating with the heat from the cell. We're making it a radiator from the internal heat not form the electrical resistive heating.
And we can coat it with other things, there's carbide, there's other ceramics you could use, there are ceramics that go 4000 degrees like hafnium, tantalum[?] carbide that can coat it with stuff . There's all kind of things we can do that you can't do with a tungsten light bulb.
Q: Two quick questions. One is it are you still kind of going for the meter by meter by meter size?
RLM: It's be smaller now because it's too much power.
Q. And -
RLM: But we wanna go something like 250kW electric with 2000 sun irradiation on a PV is what we're shooting for eventually. We'll probably go 1000 sun initially for generation and 2000 after that.
Q: So if it's smaller than that, as you said you're gonna have parts that you can unscrew and that will all be easily maintained-
RLM: Yeah, all these parts are, this things really easy to break down.
Q: Secondly, you have all this on the website and how difficult would it be for somebody to kind of recreate what you're doing just by looking at all the information you've given?
RLM: There's we thought the advantages outweighed advantages having it in the public domain, there;s disadvantages. We' thought the advantages outweighed the disadvantages and we're just looking to push this to market very quickly and get huge market share, a lot of people to sign up, get manufacturing capacity, distributor capacity, get the end users and customers and help us get adopters earlier and other partners. there's no one to my knowledge in the field right now and I think there's quite a bit of skepticism whether we can do that so we're just going to keep on moving and moving it into the market. So, it'll take a while for competitors. and the other thing is evne if someone bootleggedit or wanted to bootleg it, I don't know anybody who's infringing in power technology. There's a lot of things you can infringe. I don't see anybody selling infringed electric motors or batteries and electric vehicles or controllers. I don't see anybody putting out infringed power generators on the utility grid and things like that. It's a little more difficult to bootleg a power source than it is, say, a hairdryer or something like that.
[indistinct..... so if you want to go ahead with your question]
[110 minutes]
Q: Okay yeah- one of the key things that hasn’t been addressed- I’m sure you’ve thought about it., we’re talking about a continuous power source- 1MW - 250kW. Can you turn it up and down like when you’re going down the road in a truck you’re accelerating, decelerating coasting so there’s a change in the load. Do you have the ability with this technology to change the output?
RLM: Yes. You can change the water injection and you can change the fuel injection and you can just dump power. I know that sounds kind of obscene, most people wouldn’t dump power but it really doesn’t cost anything [to use] water vapor from the air. You got the amortization the capital cost anyhow so there’s no real moving parts, so you just dump it.
[Q. Indistinct]
RLM: What’s that?
Q. You charge for that?
RLM: We might have something that’s load hours. We could build that into the systems. I mean ultimately on a microsecond time scale you could dump the power if you wanted to. I mean if you really- if you needed to but there’s ways that you could turn it up and down like a conventional engine.
Like if you take a fuel cell, it takes a very very long time to respond. This could be very very fast in comparison. ... it could grid follow but if you wanted it super super fast you could just dump the power and just run it flat out.
Q: Okay. And also you got a lot of heat that's being produced. Heat is an energy source are you look at ways to harness that or are you going to dump it?
RLM: Probably dump it. Look, the trade off is, what’s the capital cost to take the heat exchanger cause you’re coming off the back of the PV. You want the PV to be around 100 degrees C, off the cooling side. So [if] you’re going to take that heat and use it, cos then you need a heat exchanger and then you gotta go into another heat exchanger and you have to transport that heat- OR you could just run electric wires. And if the electricity’s, if it's extraordinarily cheap then you’d just run everything electric, including heat.
Q: Randy, in 2014 you sent a note out on twitter that said sourcing component issues- can’t get at Home Depot or Lowes and just to be clear has that all been resolved?
RLM: Yes
Q. Ok that’s fine. Thank you.
RLM: Well, a lot of this stuff we’re making. You could see all the other parts we’re making. None of that’s commercial parts. So the- right now, the thing we have now is the electromagnetic pump is a proven technology and capacitors are things we can buy, thus far all the things we can buy or fabricate very conveniently. Very simple design, no moving parts, so yeah thank God. It looks really good.
Yeah Lewis?
Q. Have you though about putting one one piece units into a test car and running it until it stops running...
RLM: I'm sure as soon as have one we're gonna do it.
Q. [?????]
RLM: If everything stays on track, and the PV doesn't look like its that big a problem and, so far I don't see any show stoppers. But you can guarantee that I'm just going to grab somebody's Tesla and rip it out and put it in there. You have to do it. I mean its something you have to do. Or any other electric vehicle, the Volt or whatever.
Q. Randy, um, do you anticipate when you operate this and set the operating temperatures that the device will actually work to condition tungsten dome over time?
RLM: Yeah, I think it'll be fine.
Q. Possible strengthen the tungsten?
RLM: We could rib it. Or make it thicker. There's- that's a structural issue
Q. Right
RLM: There's engineering ways of making it so it has more strength but we're going to keep the pressure on both sides the same.
Right
RLM: It's got a way of equalizing the pressure of the inner and outer chamber and the outer chamber seals it from the atmosphere so its always going to be same pressure on both sides. But we can strengthen it if we need to. Yes, maybe one more question and we'll wrap it up.
Q. ... first hand knowledge ... technologies that resemble this.... Do you have any knowledge of this when you talk about competition and ...issues?
RLM: Nobody's working on this that I'm aware of. No, no resemblance.
RLM: Okay thank you very much. I really appreciate your- we'll probably have another one, as soon as get through our next big hurdle we'll have another one and we'd love to have you back. Look forward to it then.
Thank you.
[End of Demonstration/End of Video at 1.55.24 (115.24 minutes)