Chapter 11: The Fusion Engine
This series of processes of atomic fusion reactions seems to be very simple, as if it is easy to achieve, but in fact, it is not an ordinary difficulty for human technology to realize this kind of nuclear fusion reaction through human efforts, especially the nuclear fusion reaction that can be controlled.
The reason for this is simple: the temperature required for nuclear fusion is simply too high. For example, the fusion between tritium (H3) and deuterium (H2), which are the least conditional in the fusion reaction, requires at least tens of millions of degrees of temperature to achieve. However, hydrogen 3 is a radioactive element with a half-life of 12.4 years, which does not exist in nature, and if you want to use it for nuclear fusion reactions, you must make it specially.
In the second place, the fusion reaction between helium-3 and hydrogen-2, which is relatively easy to achieve, also requires a temperature of about 100 million degrees, and other fusion reactions, such as deuterium-deuterium fusion, require a temperature of at least 100 million degrees. How can humans achieve such a high temperature, and how can they control it?
It is possible to create tens of millions or hundreds of millions of degrees of temperature, such as using the extreme heat generated by the explosion of an atomic bomb to promote a fusion reaction (which is how the hydrogen bomb is made), or using a high-energy laser beam to irradiate the temperature to increase the temperature.
Well, how to control such a high temperature has left scientists on Earth scratching their minds. The uncontrollable nuclear fusion reaction, which is a one-shot deal, like the hydrogen bomb, has no positive meaning for humanity other than its incomparably powerful lethality.
If human beings want to use the huge energy generated by nuclear fusion to serve themselves, how to control the extreme heat of nearly 100 million degrees will be the first difficulty they have to overcome. In order to solve this problem, scientists have developed two of the most important and mature theories of inertial confinement and magnetic confinement for confinement of high-temperature reactors, and each of them has actively built controllable nuclear fusion devices for experiments according to the theoretical design.
Up to now, the two different controllable fusion devices have also achieved great success, and even the United States, the most technologically advanced country, has a nuclear fusion reactor put into commercial use, and the final full-scale practical application seems to be just around the corner. And the design drawings of the controllable nuclear fusion reactor that Ye Qiuli obtained earlier are at the level of science and technology that is about to be fully put into practical use.
Of course, although mankind has taken a crucial step in controlled nuclear fusion, it is still far from the small, simple, efficient and stable degree that Ye Qiu needs to be. The reason for this is not that the theoretical research of earth scientists is insufficient, but because the current level of science and technology still has not solved the problem of materials, and has not yet found a material with sufficient strength and high temperature resistance to effectively reduce the volume and complexity of the entire device.
This limitation of basic materials is a global problem, and even more than 20 years ago, the super material formula that Japan strongly coveted, and even bribed domestic officials and sent innate ninjas to snatch it, has still not developed a new material that is sufficient to meet the requirements.
After careful research, Ye Qiuli has discovered that the super material inadvertently synthesized by Chinese scientist Professor Li Chengdong is actually a composite material with all five elements, and its formula contains metal particles, plant particles, rock particles, light and heavy water sources and other five element materials, all of which are lacking. And the reason why it can show such perfect attributes is precisely because the various components of the five elements attribute are properly fused together in the synthesis process, giving full play to its own attributes and abilities to the greatest extent.
On this basis, those variants with different properties and functions are actually the result of minor adjustments to the individual components of this super material. As long as the adjusted five elements of the composite material can be guaranteed to be balanced and not collapse, it is indeed possible to transform many special materials that can meet various unique requirements, such as super high-temperature resistant materials, room temperature superconducting materials, etc., which are possible goals.
It's just that although the theory is so, it is extremely difficult to really achieve that kind of result, not to mention those scientists on the earth who basically don't understand the theory of the five elements of yin and yang, that is, Ye Qiuli, a real cultivator, who has an extremely deep understanding of the attributes of the five elements of yin and yang of various materials, and there is no way to completely guarantee that the attributes of the five elements of various formulas can be perfectly balanced, and most of them still end in failure.
The composition of the world can be divided into time and space in terms of expression, and in essence, it can be divided into matter and energy. In fact, any kind of thing is the unity of matter and energy, and the basic materials that constitute various specific items are naturally no exception, in addition to the real, visible and tangible material attributes, there is also an indispensable energy attribute.
These energy attributes, in general state, are usually manifested as the most common attributes of the five elements, and in some special cases, they will also be manifested as more common attributes such as yin and yang attributes, and substances that do not have any attributes at all do not exist in this world at all.
In ancient times, when scientific and technological civilization had not yet begun to develop, the sages and wise men among human beings understood the world through wisdom and heart, and in the fine understanding of spiritual power, they discovered the material and energy attributes of things, and based on it, summed up a set of unified theoretical system of material and energy represented by the five elements of yin and yang, which can not only perfectly recognize everything around human beings, but also take it as a guide, understand themselves, cultivate themselves, and slowly embark on an evolutionary road of cultivating immortals, and comprehensively improve their life level。
However, this way of understanding the world is wonderful, but it is also too mysterious, and the requirements for personal qualifications are too high, which cannot be learned by ordinary people, and once the understanding is not in place, it is easy to get entangled in it and cannot extricate itself. Therefore, latecomers gradually separate the material and energy properties of things, learn more about the more specific and intuitive material properties, and slowly ignore the energy properties.
Today, in the way human beings understand the objective world, they basically no longer discuss the energy properties of things, but study their material properties to an extremely high level. Among them, the discovery of the periodic law and the formulation of the periodic table are one of his greatest achievements. The knowledge of physics, chemistry and other scientific and technological knowledge built on that foundation is also the most fundamental cornerstone of industrial civilization in today's era.
Prior to this, the various materials discovered and synthesized by human beings naturally followed the basic laws of the periodic law of the elements and conformed to the explanations of various physical and chemical theories. However, the super material that Professor Li Chengdong inadvertently compounded is no longer the same, it has faintly got rid of the shackles of simple material properties, and returned to the cognitive mode of combining matter and energy that was popular in ancient times.
Such a brand-new field of scientific research naturally needs the guidance of new scientific theories to study clearly, and scientists on the earth, whether foreign or domestic, still hold on to the inherent established understanding of the past, and take theories and laws such as the periodic law of the elements as the eternal criterion, and study the kind of things that compound energy attributes within the framework of pure material properties, and naturally do not get any benefits.
It is precisely for this reason that even if the formula and process of the super material compounded by Professor Li Chengdong are still leaked out for various reasons, making it almost everywhere on the whole earth, there are still not many people who have researched anything new on its basis.
In the most basic guiding theory will be mistaken, in that case the results of scientific research can be imagined, to use the word "half the effort" to explain is a bit excessive, can be described by the blind cat meets the metaphor of the dead mouse, no results are very normal things, the real results will be strange! That is really a coincidence, good luck to the home of the situation will only appear in the case.
It is precisely because of this kind of divergence from the beginning that in recent decades, those scientists on the earth have not had a clear and definite idea and system in the process of researching super materials and their various variants.
Among them, the United States, which has deep pockets, has invested the most funds and resources, and has carried out the most frequent experiments, so it has achieved the most remarkable results, and so far there have been four or five kinds of super materials, including raw materials, which have made a big leap forward in the level of science and technology in China.
However, even so, those supermaterials, which are already extremely impressive, still cannot meet the demanding requirements of controlled nuclear fusion reaction devices, and can only be used to make peripheral auxiliary equipment, not core facilities. Without sufficiently strong materials, the miniaturization of controlled nuclear fusion reactors can only exist in the design of scientists, and real success is still far away.
Just like the fusion reactor successfully built by the United States, it is still a "tokamak" type magnetic field confinement device that cost hundreds of billions of dollars to construct, and the Americans who are not short of money have spent huge sums of money to build many superconducting coils, and the huge magnetic field generated by them confines the reactor and makes it controllable. As a result, the experiment of controlled nuclear fusion was indeed successful, but the entire experimental device was intolerably large, and there was no connection with the word "miniaturization" at all.