From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Thu Apr 22 1999 - 16:09:55 MDT
At 02:28 AM 4/22/99 -0400, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>
>b) There is a new power source that one of the Russian Institutes just
>sold to the US military which uses a small charge of conventional
>explosives to generate 1 megawatt for a tiny fraction of a second. They
>are evaluating it now for space defense weapons use. Don't know the
>technology behind it.
I've heard about these types of technologies and there are a number of ways
to do this, and they all work like any other generator. They just operate
at extreme velocities and therefore generate a shorter, bigger power spike.
The simplest would be something like the inverse of a rail gun. The
explosives are used to drive an appropriate projectile through the tube at
extreme velocities. Using low (deflagrating) explosives you could achieve
about 2,000 m/s and with high (detonating) explosives about 10,000 m/s. As
long as you are not worried about where the projectile goes after it leaves
the generator, such a generator could be used many times at a rapid rate of
fire. I've seen power generated this way, although neither with explosives
nor with any intent of doing something useful with the power generated.
Obviously, there are number of ways you could do this. This was just the
first one to cross my mind.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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