Huang Mingzhe spent more than a week at the Lianhuashan nuclear R&D base, only advancing multiple controllable nuclear fusion to the sulfur atom stage.

The sulfur atom then faced many technical difficulties, and the engineering would greatly increase the volume of the reactor, which was obviously caused by the poor material.

"Material material! After all, it is a hurdle that cannot be crossed. Huang Mingzhe shook his head and said.

Dong Kuan patted him on the shoulder: "We have completed the theoretical design, and we can definitely do it next, it's only a matter of time." ”

However, Huang Mingzhe is not so blindly optimistic, from the perspective of theoretical design, the reactor needs to improve the material performance by at least about 10 times, before it can barely reach the minimum standard.

If miniaturization is to be satisfied, the material performance needs to be improved by 30~50 times.

As a top scientist in materials science and a master of computational materials science, Huang Mingzhe knows that the materials science of the new human race has entered a bottleneck period.

The bottleneck of atomic-molecular-scale materials has arrived as expected.

This is a fundamental congenital limitation, and even if atomic-molecular materials play tricks, they are atomic-molecular materials, which are much weaker than the degenerate neutron materials and quark materials.

"Lao Dong, I will take the multiple controllable nuclear fusion with you, and I will deal with the matter of the Nuclear Fusion Engine Research Institute."

"No problem."

As for Wei Feng, he has long been smeared with oil on the soles of his feet, he is not very interested in nuclear fusion, and Huang Mingzhe pulled him over before, and when he got to the stage of carbon atoms, he knew that he could not do anything.

Now that he's working on two large physics projects, there's no time to waste here.

Huang Mingzhe went to his office, put the stand-in robot back in the storage pod, and left the nuclear research and development base.

In the unknown base, Huang Mingzhe, who withdrew from the virtual network, moved his body.

Coming to the outside of the base, here is a secret base built in the depths of Wuyi Mountain, and now the area around Wuyi Mountain is already a natural scenic area, and there are very few human activities.

As the core area of the new human race, East Asia will still retain a population of 4~500 million in the future.

Although it is a human civilization area, there are some ecologically fragile areas that should be withdrawn.

For example, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, and various mountainous areas, except for the historical cities that will be preserved, the populations of other regions have been fully migrated.

Next to this base is an abandoned town.

All the residents of the town moved to Philadelphia in North America, saying that it was a joke to say that it was difficult to leave their homeland, because it was an environmental restriction in the past, and the country was overcrowded, and there was no place to move.

Now that the new humans occupy the entire Blue Star, they settle a lot of plain land, and there are many differences between the new human concept and the old humans, they do not reject migration.

Huang Mingzhe walked through the town, and Zhang Shihe protected him like a shadow.

The houses in the town are still there, and they are all recycled like plastic products and household appliances.

The mottled walls, the lime pits are pitted, and the red bricks are exposed, and moss, weeds, and trumpet flowers are encroaching on human remains.

Meow......

He looked up and saw a large cat with cubs staring at strangers on the balcony on the second floor.

Less than a month after humans moved out en masse, wildlife and plants began to recover.

"Life is so great, Blue Star has never cared about human beings, and we don't need human beings to save us, we are just saving ourselves." Huang Mingzhe sighed.

Walking around, the human traces of this town are disappearing, and the animals and plants are destroying the reinforced concrete and furniture items of human existence.

Maybe in a few years, there will be no more small towns here.

"Let's go!"

Back inside the base.

Huang Mingzhe entered the virtual network again and landed on the stand-in robot located at the Qinhuangdao Nuclear Fusion Engine Research Institute.

Qin Changge, who is in charge of the management of this research institute, is the person in charge of the laser laboratory of the former Thinking Society.

He introduced Huang Mingzhe to the idea of the next generation of nuclear fusion engines.

Huang Mingzhe listened and quickly flipped through the materials of the institute.

Generally speaking, spacecraft engines require two things to work – energy and working fluid.

In chemical energy rockets, the propellant acts as both a father and a mother, providing both the energy of propulsion and the working fluid of propulsion.

This seems to simplify the structure, but according to the law of conservation of momentum, it can be seen that the specific impulse of the rocket is directly proportional to the velocity of the ejection working fluid, and there is an upper limit to the velocity of the ejection working fluid of the chemical energy rocket.

A nuclear fusion engine is an engine that uses the energy generated by fusion to heat the working fluid (the fusion product itself can also be used as working fluid) to produce propulsion.

In a fusion engine, there are three types of energy that come from fusion reactions: plasma heat, neutron energy, and bremsstern radiation energy.

Plasma thermal energy, when the fusion fuel is fused, the fuel atoms are ionized into useful hot plasma ions, which contains most of the fusion energy and is also the energy that is easy to use.

Many fusion reactions or side reactions produce lethal neutron radiation, and high-energy neutrons are also lethal to new humans.

In addition, prolonged neutron exposure can lead to neutron embrittlement and neutron activation in engine components.

Neutron energy is a semi-wasted state in a fusion direct-injection engine.

Bremssterone radiation energy, on the other hand, occurs mainly when ions collide with electrons in a hot plasma from a nuclear fusion reaction.

Useful plasma heat energy is converted into useless, dangerous X-ray plus cold ions, which is also considered a waste of energy.

Huang Mingzhe knows that the upper limit of the engineering of a nuclear fusion engine is about 30% of the speed of light, but it is difficult for humans to reach even 10% now.

The main reason is that too much energy is wasted in the nuclear fusion direct injection engine, resulting in a large fuel load ratio, and only 50,000 tons of nuclear fuel can accelerate the 500-ton equipment to 12% of the speed of light, and the fuel load ratio reaches 100.

That is, 1 ton of equipment needs 100 tons of fuel to accelerate, and too much energy and working fluid are wasted.

Huang Mingzhe already understood Qin Changge's thinking: "Your plan is a hybrid model, this idea is good. ”

"This is also the idea that existed in the A.D. era, and we just reached the technical conditions, so we used it." Qin Changge explained with a smile.

"Let's go see your prototype."

"No problem."

……

In the laboratory, a 12-ton nuclear fusion engine is being ignited.

This engine is a little different from the previous fusion direct-injection engine.

The so-called hybrid mode is because there are three modes of nuclear fusion engines: pure fusion, fusion afterburner engine, and dual-mode fusion engine.

The hybrid mode is a dual-mode fusion engine.

In addition to plasma heat, this fusion engine also uses neutrons and bremsstrar energy to heat the cold reaction mass.

In addition, the dual mode can be switched to pure fusion mode, so this mode has the highest minimum thrust/propellant mass flow, and the highest exhaust velocity/specific impulse.

"Look, Chairman, this is a magnetic-inertial engine in hybrid mode." Qin Changge introduced it quickly.

"How much has the fuel efficiency improved so far?"

"About 26%, if the working fluid is collected in outer space, the fuel utilization rate can be increased to about 85%."

Huang Mingzhe nodded, this improvement is very huge, even if it is conservative, it can reduce the fuel load ratio of the spacecraft by about one-third.

For a spacecraft, a slight drop in the fuel-to-load ratio can allow the spacecraft to increase its payload.