Yesterday I discussed that the two major problems I (and most other scientists who actually know what they're talking about) see with building a powered suit like Iron Man is providing the suit with a massively powerful, high-endurance, portable power supply. The most advanced powered suit currently made, from Sarcos, requires a thick electrical cable driving a 208, 3phase power supply.
In the movie Iron Man, this problem is solved with a mystical "arc reactor" which basically appears to be a fictionalized derivation of a Tokamak toroidal fusion reactor.
Here's my idea. Obviously this comes with a warning that it completely impractical and unlikely to even get the notice of scientists who work on this sort of thing.
1. Silver-palladium hydride (material used in catalytic converters) is used to filter normal air and capture hydrogen and deuterium through a series of tubes into a capture-vessel.
2. Hydrogen is separated from the deuterium. The hydrogen is separated into two streams, and the first stream is then combusted to drive a tiny piston that in turn drives the fan that blows the air through the silver-palladium catalytic converter...producing more hydrogen and deuterium
3. The hydrogen combustion produces water, which is fed into a small tank. The deuterium is then injected into this tank and bombarded with neutrons, producing tritium.
4. The neutrons come from the second stream of captured hydrogen that is driven through a tiny linear accelerator and collided, producing a relatively safe neutron stream that is directed into the deuterium-enriched water.
5. Process 4 produces a lot of heat, so some of the water from the hydrogen combustion is piped around the linear accelerator, cooling it through evaporation.
6. The tritium is agitated by directing it through a series of oppositely polarized magnetics, causing it to aggressively decay, which produces Helium-3 and an electron.
7. The electron is captured and used in a betavoltaic power device that powers the suit.
8. The Helium-3 is directed into the neutron stream used to produce the tritium and it converts back into tritium, the bi-product of which is hydrogen, which can be fed back into the main hydrogen stream.
Now I don't know if this would work, and it probably wouldn't, but if you could get this going, you basically get electricity out of air, with no emission of anything except water vapor.
The major hurdles are:
1. Is the hydrogen produced by the catalytic converter capable of combusting and driving the fan plus feeding the linear accelerator?
2. How does the linear accelerator get its power?
3. How much tritium can possibly be produced? How many electrons can be produced from decaying this tritium?
4. Would this fit into a device that a person could wear?
There are probably much, much easier ways of producing electrons (like rubbing a balloon in your hair) but this was the only one I could quickly surmise that could be (in a fantasy world) produced from air.
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Donnerstag, 19. März 2009
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