Clifton Whittaker, who will be a senior physics major at Whittier College in September has joined LPPFusion as a Research Associate for the summer of 2015. Whittaker has already contributed ably to helping fire the first shots with the new electrodes and troubleshooting early oscilloscope problems. Clifton Whittaker – Research Associate
With just a dozen shots performed so far, we can draw only very preliminary conclusions from our results. The first is that impurities do indeed seem to have dropped significantly with the new electrodes—the first main goal of the new experiments. Impurities appear to be the basic obstacle to high fusion yields, as they disrupt…
On June 16, LPPFusion’s Focus Fusion-1 (FF-1) device resumed firing, after a hiatus of 19 months. It became the first dense plasma focus device of over 1 meg-ampere current to use monolithic tungsten electrodes, or to fire with pre-ionization. (Pre-ionization involves using a small current to smooth the way for a larger one.) So far,…
We have now obtained US Department of Commerce permission to import the cylindrical beryllium billets we will need for our next set of electrodes. The beryllium electrodes will be needed in later stages of our experi-mental program, as the x-ray flux from our plasmoid becomes too intense for the tungsten electrodes. Beryllium is far more…
Frustrated by repeated rejections by US immigration authorities, Dr. Hamid Yousefi has returned to Iran and resigned as LPPFusion’s Chief Research Officer. Last year, Dr. Yousefi’s wife Sarah was rejected for a visa by the US State Department and had to stay in Iran with their son. As a result, Dr. Yousefi applied to change…
LPP Focus Fusion Report May 21 2015
Showing confidence in the outcome of LPPFusion’s new experiments, The Abell Foundation has invested an additional $200,000 in LPPFusion. The Foundation, based in Baltimore Maryland, is LPPFusion’s sole institutional investor and in 2008 made a $500,000 investment that was critical to the construction of the FF-1 plasma focus device that we are now using. The…
LPPFusion’s lab team has completed the mechanical repair and reinforcement of the tungsten cathode. The first and most difficult step was to apply the fiber-epoxy composite around the broken rim of the cathode. (See April LPP Focus fusion Report for a description of how this damage occurred.) The purpose of applying the compo-site was…
The new tungsten monolithic cathode, key to LPPFusion’s next set of experiments, arrived at our laboratory in Middlesex, NJ on Feb. 27. Careful acceptance tests confirmed that it is 99.95% pure tungsten and is within the 150 micron tolerances that we specified, a significant accomplishment by the manufacturer Tungsten Heavy Powder and their colleagues in…
In a highly unusual action, the US Citizenship and Immigration Service has issued a notice of intent to revoke the EB-1 visa of LPPF Chief Research Officer Dr. Hamid Reza Yousefi. The USCIS claims that, even though the service concluded that Dr. Yousefi was an “outstanding” scientist worthy of this type of immigrant visa, on…