Chapter 605: The Unavoidable Bottleneck
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it was still noon.
After sending the email, Sarot went to the bar and got very drunk.
In order to keep a clear mind during the experiment, he never had the habit of drinking at noon, but this time he made an exception.
Sitting next to him in a bar on the edge of Silicon Valley, his assistant Paul sighed and comforted him.
"Thinking about it, it may not be a bad thing for your laboratory to be sold to Exxon Mobil. Although Professor Lu is a very good...or a great scholar, the resources he can give you are actually not that good. What's more, Exxon Mobil spent 50 million to buy us, certainly not just to keep us on the bench..."
Seeing that Professor Sarot didn't respond at all, Paul knew that his consolation probably didn't work, so he shrugged and forcibly ended the topic.
"In short, being rich is not a bad thing."
Sarot grinned.
"You do not understand."
Paul: "...what do I not understand?"
Sarot didn't explain anything, just raised the wine bottle and took a few sips, but talked about other things on his own.
"My dear Paul, I have always believed that academics should be a free thing. As long as it does not violate the most basic human ethics, even if it is not so correct, as long as you believe it is right, you should advocate it .The more people don't believe you, the more you should prove yourself right to them."
Paul frowned and asked, "Isn't it free now?"
"Perhaps it is," Sarot sighed, looking up at the ceiling, "but when you reach my level, when your research or behavior has become a gear that drives the world forward... Your understanding of freedom may have a different feeling.”
Paul didn't say anything, just looked at Professor Sarot in puzzlement.
After not speaking for a while, Sarot put the empty wine bottle next to the stool and picked up another bottle.
Just when Paul was about to remind him "you drank too much", he said abruptly.
"After a while, I plan to immigrate."
"Where are you going? Professor Lu's laboratory?"
"I don't know, it's not Huaguo anyway, there is only one Professor Lu there..."
Sarot, who was holding a wine bottle, thought for a while and scratched his hair decadently, "Maybe it's Holland? I heard from my father that our ancestors lived in a small town in Utrecht until the Germans bombed Rotterdam. …But I have never been there. A long time ago Utrecht University sent me an invitation to be a professor there, but their salary is too low and the resources are not as good as Cornell University gave me ...But now that I think about it, if I had accepted that invitation, maybe the situation wouldn't have been so bad?"
...
The research of fusion batteries has fallen into a bottleneck, and the problem of heat dissipation of the core seems to be an insoluble problem, so that many people in the project team began to doubt the technical route itself.
After all, is nuclear fusion really as miniaturized as nuclear fission?
Is the route of inertial confinement really feasible for miniaturized controllable fusion?
The most troubling thing is, if there is no need for a magnetic field to withstand the energy beyond the stars, what kind of material can withstand the instant heat?
However, they don't seem to have much choice other than inertial constraints. After all, on a small spacecraft, there is simply not enough space to create a closed magnetic cage for them to confine those plasmas.
No one can answer these questions, not even previous research can be used as a reference.
In order to seek inspiration for solving problems, Lu Zhou has collected a large number of papers related to aerospace, fission batteries, and space station heat dissipation technology these days, trying to get inspiration from some public research materials.
In fact, these papers did give him some inspiration.
For example, a paper on "First-principle study of phonons in α-boron and its icosahedral boron-rich compounds" provides an interesting thermoelectric conversion model while discussing the scattering phenomenon of electrons on phonons .
Converting thermal energy into electrical energy is indeed an interesting idea in a sense. In fact, most nuclear fission batteries used in spacecraft are also based on this method.
However, this does not fundamentally solve the problem.
Using the temperature difference between the inside and outside of the spacecraft to generate electricity may improve the efficiency of converting heat energy into electricity to a limited extent, but it does not change the fact that heat removal is difficult.
Sitting in the office, Lu Zhou leaned on the office chair, turning a pen in his hand, and muttered to himself to the ceiling.
"It would be nice to have a controlled fusion reaction with a slow exotherm."
Or, make the area of the pulse fire small enough...
At this time, a voice floating next to him interrupted his thoughts.
"Professor, what are you talking about?"
Holding a document bag on his chest, Zhao Huan, who was standing in front of the desk, was looking at him curiously.
Lu Zhou: "Nothing... Is there something?"
Zhao Huan nodded and said, "Well, it will be the tenth week soon, and your computing materials class is about to start. Here is your class schedule."
"I see, I'll put the schedule here," Lu Zhou said, stood up from his office chair, sighed, "...I'll go for a walk, call me if there's anything to do."
"En." Zhao Huan nodded.
She didn't know if it was an illusion, but she always felt that the professor was in a bad mood.
In fact, Assistant Zhao's intuition is not wrong. Lu Zhou's current mood is indeed not very good, and he can even be said to be a little irritable.
Intuition told him that the research idea he chose was correct.
However, it seemed that there was an invisible barrier blocking the seemingly feasible road in front of him.
Vaguely, Lu Zhou felt that the bottleneck was not in the field of engineering, but in the field of theory.
That is, there is no sufficient theoretical basis to support his research on the miniaturization of controllable fusion.
Moreover, this kind of difficulty cannot be like stellarator for tokamak, from an engineering point of view, it can bypass the phenomenon of magnetic island and magnetic surface tearing in plasma physics, and transfer the theoretical difficulty to the engineering difficulty and cost.
"Is there a penalty for scientific research efficiency caused by advanced research?"
Walking on the tree-lined path of the campus, thinking of Lu Zhou, he suddenly smiled and shook his head.
Probably the year before last, when he first came into contact with the research of controllable nuclear fusion, he also encountered a similar situation.
At that time, the topological research methods of L-manifolds and partial differential equations had not yet been proposed, and the existence and smoothness of solutions to NS equations, as well as the theoretical model of plasma turbulence, belonged to two major unsolved problems in the fields of mathematics and physics. mystery of.
It is also after these theoretical problems have been resolved that the realization of controllable fusion technology has a sufficient theoretical basis.
Without these theories as a foundation, it would be almost impossible for the German Helix 7-X or the STAR-1 stellarator device modified by him to achieve those impressive results.
However, where is the theoretical bottleneck of the miniaturization of controllable fusion?
If this bottleneck is really theoretical...
Passing through the tree-lined path, Lu Zhou, who was thinking about the problem, unknowingly walked to the place where he usually lectures.
Standing on the podium was a professor he didn't know, who probably talked about physics.
Through the glass on the wall, he could clearly see that the students in the classroom were listening attentively.
However, just as he was about to leave here, he glanced from the corner of his eye on the blackboard, and suddenly caught a glimpse of a few key words.
The inspiration in the dark is gone in a flash.
Lu Zhou's heart moved slightly, without any hesitation, he walked towards the back door of the classroom.