New Power Production Technique Accelerates Fuel 200 Times the Speed of Sound

In a new advancement, experts might already have achieved a novel technique for power production. According to the study, the method uses a system that could initiate controlled nuclear fusion.

Power Generation and Nuclear Fusion

University of Oxford's spin-off institution, First Light Fusion, developed an approach called projectile fusion that can be utilized to accelerate fuel faster than we have ever witnessed. The scholars said that the fuel acceleration has a speed of about 200 times the speed of sound.

Pistol shrimps' mechanisms inspire the new power production method. These animals are known to have physiology with an oversized claw which they use to land a hyper-speed punch in just a few milliseconds.

Like the pistol shrimp, the method First Light Fusion selected, called projectile fusion, is more basic but efficiently eats up energy. Moreover, the technique is way more affordable than the conventional technologies we currently have today.

FirstLight Fusion CEO and co-founder Nick Hawker explained that their team's chosen method for fusion is based on simplicity, Daily Mail reports.

Through a simple process, the firm believes that projectile fusion would be the fastest approach to modify a more commercially viable fusion-based power generation, Hawker continued.

The conventional approach for obtaining this energy harnessing technology utilizes inertial fusion. In this separate formula, a small amount of fuel is being injected via a laser component to make it spark and burn.

FirstLight Fusion's innovation aims to obtain a simpler medium that could carry out nuclear fusion with energy efficiency and has a lower risk in terms of physical aspects.

By utilizing a more direct and simpler process, the projectile fusion can offer a higher velocity projectile that can run without expensive and complex mechanisms.

Cheap and Efficient Power Production

Two large 'gas guns' are included in the whole procedure of this new nuclear fusion technique. A hypervelocity launch can be carried out through these big components using a projectile pellet. Inside the rounded ammo, fusion fuels such as deuterium and tritium are kept.

The projectile launch could reach a speed of more than 23,000 kilometers per hour, which is 20 times relatively faster than the speed of sound, before hitting its target point.

Once the projectile pellet hits the fuel, the object's speed accelerates over 250,000 kilometers per hour, which is 200 times the speed of sound. By achieving this velocity, the process could create a pulse of fusion energy.

According to the experts, the technique could be transposed into large-scale power plants. A projectile could be launched by utilizing a similar method, which is dropping a nuclear fusion fuel into the reaction chamber and might relay similar results.

FirstLight Fusion specialists explained that the energy inside the chamber would be absorbed by lithium and heat it. It will serve as protection for the chamber when large energy pulses take place inside the chamber, solving the long-standing engineering conundrum in nuclear fusion.

Each pellet target could power up an average home for more than two years. The approach obtained the solution and saved at least £45 million compared to today's potential technologies.

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