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Robert Forward once suggested that diamond was strong enough to contain electron degenerate matter (white dwarf star material).
I'd like to get some basic insight into the physics. It's half for a story purpose, and half personal curiosity. Some questions I have are:
1) What sort of pressures would be required to contain electron degenerate matter. Could diamond or buckytube based materials theoretically have the strength required?
1a) I get the stress in a thin-walled pressure vessel is pressure*r/2t , which is equal to (3/2)* pressure * (volume enclosed) / (volume of vessel). Thick walled vessels are more complicated, I don't have much insight as to the peak stress for those,.
2) What sort of densities would be achievable?
3) Within a few orders of magnitude (hopefuly 1-2, but as accurate as one can get simply), how much energy/kg is required to do the compression? I suppose I'm envisioning adiabatic compression, but if there's some other reasonable model, I'd be interested in that too. Would the energy required be affected much by the original source material or phase (solid, liquid, gas, hydrogen, water, iron, for instance)? Would the source material affect the answer to 2 (achievable density)?
3a) How hot would the compressed material get?
5) Is there any known or semi-plausible method for creating this much pressure?
6) Would fusion conditions potentially occur spontaneously under these sorts of conditions if hydrogen were used? If deuterium was used? (This might give some insight into 5 as well.)
I'd like to get some basic insight into the physics. It's half for a story purpose, and half personal curiosity. Some questions I have are:
1) What sort of pressures would be required to contain electron degenerate matter. Could diamond or buckytube based materials theoretically have the strength required?
1a) I get the stress in a thin-walled pressure vessel is pressure*r/2t , which is equal to (3/2)* pressure * (volume enclosed) / (volume of vessel). Thick walled vessels are more complicated, I don't have much insight as to the peak stress for those,.
2) What sort of densities would be achievable?
3) Within a few orders of magnitude (hopefuly 1-2, but as accurate as one can get simply), how much energy/kg is required to do the compression? I suppose I'm envisioning adiabatic compression, but if there's some other reasonable model, I'd be interested in that too. Would the energy required be affected much by the original source material or phase (solid, liquid, gas, hydrogen, water, iron, for instance)? Would the source material affect the answer to 2 (achievable density)?
3a) How hot would the compressed material get?
5) Is there any known or semi-plausible method for creating this much pressure?
6) Would fusion conditions potentially occur spontaneously under these sorts of conditions if hydrogen were used? If deuterium was used? (This might give some insight into 5 as well.)