Applied General & Particle Physics, Hydrogen Energy and Renewable Power Research

Physics-based eVTOL Experimentation Project

eVTOL = electric vertical take off and landing

Before 2020, the military set about to create a commercial market for flying-cars (Agility Prime) resulting in the launch of what were already in 2020 at least 50+ commercial flying car vendors. Unfortunately, all of these make nothing more than propellered vehicles, sometimes just propellered single person chairs. More about the billion+ dollar SPAC deals this industry attracts is available, including photos of the eVTOL chairs & legitmate vehicles including winged craft; please see my AFWERX program page.

General Scientifics by contrast has an experimental physics-based propellerless eVTOL research program underway (since 2015 with 5 built prototypes) on an unexploited physical mechanism to generate vertical lift force electrically without propellers (without rockets, and hence importantly without the limitations of the rocket equation). In my view the physics principles of my new eVTOL tech are sound but not accepted by consensus (due to overlooked details). After discussing with NASA, their view is that it must be proven by demonstration.

The 5 prototypes built, each at successfully higher engineering quality, achieve NASA's Technology Readiness Level TRL3 - where TRL1 is concept, TRL2 is detailed written report working out substantial scientific details (where the overlooked points are emphasized), leading to TRL3 devices built. Remaining just shy lacking proof means not achieving TRL4. Higher levels of engineering skills are sought for the next iteration to end them all.

Due to the paradigm changing type of advance proposed (no rocket equation, eVTOL no propellers, unexploited physics ... etc), even the very proof with no further development might be potentially enough to drive SPAC speculations. Two $1M competitions, however, especially motivate further devlopment focused on the smaller objectives of just winning them, both to compensate the further development but also make known the technological advance since skeptics in the consensus paradigm will remain steadfast and even require more than this to be convinced.

The latest prototype was built over the year period ending June 2022 with a few missing technological advances requested up front in which the shop took zero interest: a) PID control in the electronics, b) induction power transfer coils not deployed. Lack of these hindered reaching optimal operating conditions for proof, hence a next iteration remains to be built. PID control and power induction are well in reach of advanced shops hence why direct approach to SpaceX, Blue Origin, etc subject matter experts, if possible, is currently sought.

An intergovernmental panel has been meeting annually since 2014 on eVTOL potential impact, summarized in Aug 2021 NASA eVTOL Report listing numerous applications (wildfire control, ... etc).

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Hydrogen From the Metal-Water Reaction

The Vision: M + H2O → MO + H2

The Vision for the future of Hydrogen is to consider the municipal water supply as the Hydrogen Fuel Infrastructure accessed by energy-driven recycling.

Water is the ultimate hydrogen carrier medium due to its ubiquity (vastly eliminating production, distribution & storage costs) but also for its 11% hydrogen by weight content, more than double the US Dept of Energy guideline target of 5% for hydrogen carrier research. It is true that Ammonia (\( NH_3 \)) is higher at 17.6%, and already has its own vast existing infrastructure due to its agricultural uses.\(\dagger\) Trucking ammonia around, however, would still incur distribution and storage costs which don't exist for water. Eliminating or drastically lowering distribution costs offered by the water solution has to offer financial advantages speeding the adoption of municipal water supplies as a pre-existing Hydrogen Fuel Infrastructure, in turn, Hydrogen as energy store of the future.

Extracting hydrogen from water would then take place at site of the end-user by means of the much studied metal-water reaction (MWR) researched for 50+ years in national laboratories. While that body of research remains inconclusive, it was focused mostly on complex multi-atomic metal-compounds. By contrast, General Scientifics (GS) advocates for the strictly mono-atomic pure-elemental-metal reactions which were only a very small fraction of the reactions studied.

If a suitable MWR device were engineered to introduce suitably prepared (oxide layers removed) metal atoms to water, then hydrogen could be exothermically released on demand mole per mole by end users who could then locally store amounts of hydrogen for on site daily use, be that residential (1.2 kg daily for 14 kWh), commercial, industrial, military. Given that municipal water supplies exist everywhere then such a device installed at the water inlet of any building could be an instant hydrogen-source for that building (and all its hydrogen car users), given a daily supply of the needed metal, provided by the GS-supplied MWR device extracting that metal endothermically from the daily byproduct build up.

The difficulty presents in the metal extraction from the byproduct metal-oxides. This metal extraction consumes more energy than is gained from the hydrogen, but this energy loss (by a factor of 5 or so) is already universally accepted in the practice of water electrolysis. Production of water electrolysis equipment, however, is not projected to supply expected global government mandate demands for Hydrogen over coming decades.\(\dagger\) General Scientifics proposes an MWR device to compete with water electrolysis as supply for this demand.

\(\dagger\) - see Hydrogen Energy Center 2021 Friday Hydrogen Sessions series. Number 1 discusses the gargantuan 400x increase in Hydrogen demand by 2030, 2040, 2050 by global government mandates which existing water electrolysis machine production cannot remotely supply at current levels. Number 6 discusses Ammonia information as part of the liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHC) segment. See    Sessions \( \hspace{0.15in} \) for list of all topics, and \( \hspace{0.15in} \) Recordings of Sessions

Background information about the technology behind the proposed MWR device (but not the device itself) is available at Thermochemical Water Splitting.

Hydrogen From Fossil Fuels Technologies

Thermochemical Hydrocarbon Splitting
Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) CHP systems

Hydrogen Cartridge Charger Technologies

Hydrogen Cell Phone Chargers

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Accelerator Transmutation of Nuclear Waste (ATW)

The Vision: n + Cs137 (unstable) → [ ... ] → Cs133 (stable)

sATW   Spallation Neutrons from Proton Linac or Fission Reactor

tATW   Fusion Neutrons from Tokamak Reactor

mATW Fusion Neutrons from Muon Catalyzed Fusion Target

ATW technology, well explored globally for decades, bombards unstable radioactive materials with neutrons until the nuclear isotopes change, are transmuted, into stable non-radioactive isotopes, rendering the materials benign, non-hazardous and non-lethal. I categorize ATW now in three types depending on the source of the neutrons: sATW, tATW and mATW (see above & below links for their brief descriptions). Find status reports (2003, 1999, 1997) below in the sATW link.

The Vision for mATW is to build a standalone muon beam line and frozen solid hydrogen target as a fusion neutron generator for ATW but scaled down to fit into a standard shipping container footprint (8 x 8 x 40) for ease of transport & reuse at different sites. The muons surround the hydrogen isotope nuclei in the target much closer than electronic molecules do forming muo-molecules instead so small that the hydrogen nuclei spatially overlap fusing them into helium and energetic free neutrons.

If this heavily instrumented container is then fed very large amounts of energy in one end, then a collimated beam of neutrons would emanate out the other. If cannisters of nuclear waste are raised out of their pools and placed in the neutron beams (of the correct energy and intensity, for the requisite amount of time for maximum transmutation) the radiation from these cannisters could be significantly reduced, the degree of how non-lethal and benign only depending on the energy input driving the process.

My new contribution to this field is the accidental application of my postdoctoral work in Japan at the muon catalyzed fusion accelerator of my hosts. After I calculated the angular distribution of neutrons coming out of nuclear fusion reactions, I observed theoretical results identifying known but difficult to obtain conditions which can collimate a neutron beam (preventing isotropic emission in all directions equally). At the time, this was just postdoctoral research revealing a newly expected side effect (this collimation) if
the 1935 predictionby the physicist who wrote my recommendation letter for the postdoc.
for increasing the fusion rate by 50% was ever implemented.

Accidental conversations a few years ago, however, with a Thorium Reactor advocate about nuclear waste elimination led to application of this collimation to ATW, the other nuclear waste elimination method. Neutral particles in general cannot be bent by magnetic fields, as is standard for charged particles. Changing the direction of or focusing neutrons to increase their intensity on target is then difficult if not impossible any other way but if it were available it would be useful in the ATW process to increase irradiation of nuclear waste (to transmute radioactive nuclides into their non-radioactive neighbors on the nuclide chart) speeding up the transmutation per unit input energy.

As seen then, mATW is a direct application of my postdoctoral results, and my attempts in 2017 to prepare this for an SBIR (and an unsolicited proposal to a US DOE department my Senator helped identify) accidentally fell upon the ears of someone who knew the Ukraine Minister of Energy and his meeting with the US State Dept the next week; my invited letter was apparently on that table. My modest intentions to build/test at first in a local lab, at best at only a single local reactor in the USA, were rudely and coarsely thrust in front of the most prominent nuclear waste site in the world entirely by mistake; the good news however remains that this invitation indicates strong demand for a solution to this problem which mATW provides, and that new contacts in both Ministries of Ukraine and at the Kiev Institute of Nuclear Physics have been at least initially established (in addition to my own in the Budker Institute in Novosibirsk) perhaps for later collaboration.

Spallation Neutrons from Fission Reactor
Vast majority of literature in ATW focuses on sATW

Fusion Neutrons from Tokamak Reactor
New growing literature in ATW focuses on tATW

Fusion Neutrons from Muon Catalyzed Fusion Target
No literature in ATW focuses on mATW but there should be and this is strongly advocated by General Scientifics

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General Relativity (GR)

GR Time Dilation Formulae Primer

MIT-Mt Sunapee NH Time Dilation Measurement

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Muon Physics Applications

  1. Muonoscopy: Discovery of new chambers in the Pyramids: IEEE Spectrum magazine article

  2. Muon Catalyzed Fusion: A method for the release of nuclear energy (far less radioactive than a fission reactor) when Muons (\( \mu \)) from particle accelerator beams are introduced to a chamber of Hydrogen. Muons entering such a chamber form muon-molecules (in nanoseconds) so small that, by natural physics binding forces, both Hydrogen isotope nuclei are fused (in picoseconds) into Helium releasing the mass difference energy. More information is available on these mass differences.

Muon Physics Academic Research

  1. The Muon \( g-2 \) Value is the discrepancy (or anomaly) of the muon's \( Landé \ g \) factor from its theoretically ideal value of \( 2 \). The anomaly itself is caused by vacuum fluctuations arising from Quantum Physics. New higher accuracy measurements of the Muon g-2 Value can extend past the frontier of human knowledge resulting in the discovery or constraints upon New Physics.

Particle Physics General Education

New Physics from the Muon \( g-2 \) Value - planned presentation (in progress) with Rick Smith Esq



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Utilities

Running CERN ROOT on Windows10

Physics Forums already has a nice thread posting machinery tool it is intended to duplicate here. Physics Forums recommends 5 Free Javascript Utilities as a starting point but this DIY effort was quickly shot down by security vulnerabilities of these methods.

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Recent and current experience focused on:

Doctoral dissertation experience included: custom design/build of electrostatic quadrupole strips for focusing muons in a storage ring, of parts of vacuum chambers & operation of high-vacuum equipment, design of custom electronics & post-fab hardware logic debugging, build/delivery of special purpose hardware systems, coding software controls embedded in particle detector and accelerator equipment (including Russian assembler code for the ЄВМ, the Russian equivalent of the PDP-11); optimizing voltages for drift chamber wires to increase accuracy for particle tracking; analysis of data from experiments including a more accurate method for combination of statistical and systematic errors over standard error-combination methods; comparison of experimental results with and analysis of corresponding particle theory; residency setting up complex equipment at particle accelerator laboratories for tests and data taking runs in USA, Russia and Japan.

Pre-doctoral support provided by:
US Dept of Energy (DOE), Office of Basic Sciences, Particle Physics Division;
Russian Academy of Sciences, Siberian Division (CO PAN);

Post-doc by:
Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS)

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History of Physics

Discovered a new website Web of Stories which has all kinds of Nobel laureates, some physicists, in personal easy going conversational anecdote interviews broken down into short clips, or if one is interested can be seen in a "Play All" string. Below are all the Play All strings for those listed. Time to go to Nobel.se and collect laureate speeches which relate similar anecdotal science life adventure narratives for how they reached their pinnacles by unstoppable innate curiosity.

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