How Much Mechanical Stress Can an Antimatter Drive's Loop Handle?

[nehorlavazapal]

I can't go into detail right know - but the thing is: in order to make a real antimatter engine one would need to make a loop of SCs wire r = 70 m, where r(wire) is approx. 20 cm.

I need to generate about 10 T in the center of the field, that is 70 m from the nearest wire. How much mechanical stress is this going to put onto the loop? I suspect that it will be more than even carbon nanotubes can handle, but a number would be handy, still.

 

[nehorlavazapal]

Or to put it another way, if the loop was made out of best CNTs, it would take 7 GN of stress, so how strong magnetic field would it generate 70m away, down in the center.

This loop would intercept only 1/350 of resulting gamma rays out of the antimatter reaction, as. antiprotons, only 1/1000th of total engine output would heat the engine (disregard. any induced heating..? does anyone see any induction heating possible in large scale)? So, at 10 TW only 10 GW of heat would transfer to the 80 ton loop (assuming CNTs are SCs). I can take care of this heat, but need high field in the reaction core, to get thrust out of the antimatter reaction.

Assuming realistic efficiency, I would get 1 TJ of motion energy transfer to the ship. 0.5 × 80 000 × (3×10^7)2 = 3,6×10^19 J =

A year at full power to just get the loop to 10 % of the speed of light! Not counting the 8 tons of antimatter fuel neede, though plus the rest of the ship!

Antimatter is slow and more challenging than you think!

 

[berkeman]

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