I was reading the thread for the FF powering a 747 and I have to ask a question.

What if you had multiple FF units chained together?

The first unit is fired off a capacitor.

The second unit is fired off of the pulse of power from the first unit.

The third unit is fired off of the pulse of power from the second unit.  etc…

You only need to tie the capacitor bank into the first and the last FF units in the chain.

With some creative wiring, you might be able to re-route around any FF unit that burns out…

It would sure save on weight and cost of capacitor banks.

Yes, they can be daisy chained to help fire the next one. That’s what I’m looking at as a workaround for utility scale installations with nearly 1,000 cores so that 1 cap pulse only has to return to the cap bank if the whole array were to shut down for some reason. The reason for this is that this type of cap (at least on the General Atomics site) has a lousy design life of less than a million charge/ discharge cycles.

Aha,

So, in that case, by the time the last core has fired, the first core is ready to fire again.  Cool.  The power rarely needs to touch the cap.

Barry Kirk - 28 June 2010 08:46 PM

Aha,

So, in that case, by the time the last core has fired, the first core is ready to fire again.  Cool.  The power rarely needs to touch the cap.

Now all you need is about $1G and the political will to build it with no history. We really do have to solve the problem of how to store the energy for the next pulse without using a capacitor. I’m halfway wondering about a very long coil like ancient guitar reverbs used…