Antimatter Production Satellite

Positrons 1 cubic meter/hour
Anti-Protons 0.5 cubic meters/hour
Anti-Neutrons 2 cubic meters/hour


Maybe if you left it on for a year,

And had a billion satellites orbiting a star,

And they were all 100x larger than what you have now,


A far more reasonable production rate is fractions of a gram per year with this method and power source.

While that is true, you also have to consider how accurate particle accelerators could be in decades from now. I am merely using the methods we use today in real life as a basis and applying technology that would be much more advanced than what we use today.

After all, this is a method of antimatter production that everyone can wrap their heads around and allows for suspension of disbelief.

It isn't a matter of what technology you are using, it is a matter of where you are getting your energy from. There is only so much power that you can derive from star/blackhole radiation, then there is only so much of that power you can harness because of the size of your machine relative to the radiation that is put out, and then there is mechanical inefficiency.

Hawking radiation will only produce a few molecules of anti-matter every so often.

A star, while it produces a lot of power, still only produces so much. A solar power plant can only produce as much anti-matter as the power it takes in which at that size is not going to be very much. No amount of technology is going to change that.

Modern methods of anti-matter are only capable of producing a few molecules. Our entire production if left running for hundreds of years still wouldn't be producing anything more than a gram of anti-matter.

Or more basically, this is like powering a car up to highway speeds with a single watch battery.

Would you prefer it if he used something completely ludicrous and made up, as opposed to actually existent technology?

Great idea, CMDR. Kudos on using legitimate tech.

This tech is far from legitimate, it is basically producing aether levels of power with a single solar panel.

So ludicrous and made up? yes.

Since I have limited knowledge of Hawking Radiation, I can't really confirm nor deny what you are saying.

However, I will doubt the Solar Energy method. The Earth receives 174 petawatts of power at it's upper atmosphere. While 30% of that is reflected by the atmosphere before it reaches the surface, that still means 52.2 petawatts which is in essence 52.2e15 Watts. That exponentially more power than what is generated by modern Nuclear Fission Reactors. This doesn't even begin to fathom how much solar energy is striking the satellite when it is orbiting the star proper.

Yes, it's all based upon what the solar radiation collectors can take in, but that too is technology that can be improved upon even with mechanical inefficiency. From the first photovoltaic cells in 1956 to the modern photovoltaic cells, the efficiency has risen from it's paltry 14% to around 30-40%. Now these are numbers I've done with only a small amount of research, so they maybe off a bit. But if we were to go back this rise in efficiency, this would mean it would be possible to raise collector efficiency to around 80% (I'm not going to use a theoretical 90%+ because that isn't too realistic in my mind.)

And who said there's a single solar collector. The Collector Disc is 500 meters in diameter with a surface area of 785,398 squared meters. Even if you only cover half of that with solar collectors, that equates to a surface area of 392,699 squared meters.

Either way, all I am really doing is basing a futuristic idea on real-world examples and boosting their effectiveness to work in this setting. The Antimatter Production Satellite was an idea to create antimatter more cheaply than using Aether or Fusion generators to power a nanoscopic process that would expensive.

The technology does not matter, it is the power source. There is only so much power in the sun, and only so much of that power can be collected by your device.

1.8 x 10^14w is the energy in a gram of anti-matter.

Twice that amount of power is what you need to produce a gram of anti-matter at 100% efficiency.

52.2e15w is a full order of magnitude less than what it would take to produce a kilogram of anti-matter which (unless you are talking about some very not-dense cloud is still way short of what you are talking about with this submission)

So your technology, even at 100% efficiency, is incapable of producing that much anti-matter if it was used around a star. Even more so if it was around a black hole.

Uso, I'm sorry, but your arguments are irrelevant. The SARP universe follows the laws of Wesleyan Physics.

Earlier you were applauding Abwehran Commander for using real things, and now you are saying they don't matter?

The fact is the rules require a certain level of plausibility, and there is no way this submission could generate that much anti-matter in that amount of time. The only way to make it plausible would be to vastly, reduce the amount of anti-matter produced to something like fractions of a gram/day.

It does seem good enough for me. Vesper, your opinion?

The numbers:

First, lets determine the energy cross-section at the collectors distance (which is quite close). A(S-C) is the area of the sphere with radius D(S-C). P(S-C) is the power-per-square-meter at the orbit of the collector. P(C) is the power delivered over the area of the collector.

With that solved for, now find the useful power, P(E), intercepted by the collector and the waste power, P(W).


Now we have to solve for the power requirements for antimatter production. Particle accelerator production operates by increasing the thermal energy of a region of space to the pair-producing temperature (which is twice that of the rest-mass energy of the desired anti-particle). When this energy level is reached matter-antimatter pairs are created and can be separated easily due to their opposite charges.

First things first, here the reference numbers that will be used.

What we want to determine here is the power required to produce a unit-mass of antimatter per unit time. In a best-case scenario you the particle accelerator only needs to produce half of the pair-producing energy. Inefficiency of the accelerator and antimatter collector assemblies is going to be ignored. M(A) is the rate of antimatter production from the accelerator.


So per second the collector is able to produce, assuming ideal conditions, 0.183 mg/s. This is 657.7 mg/hour.

Now, we also need to consider the waste energy, which is also substantial. For ease of comparison, let us determine at what rate this energy output could melt homogenous iron that started at 0*C. The environment is assumed to be at 1 atm (actual vacuum would increase the mass vaporized).


Summary
At a orbital distance of 25 solar diameters, a collector with a diameter of 500 meters, a cell efficiency of 80%, and otherwise perfect efficiency the system will produce antimatter at the rate of 0.183 mg/s or 657.7 mg/hour. The waste heat output during production (with all efficiencies other than the collector cells being perfect) will be sufficient to vaporize 438 kg of Iron per second or 1,576.8 tons per hour.


Edit: I should note that despite the above numbers systems in this style can produce useful amounts of antimatter, they just need to be much, much larger than the one submitted.

I don't see why the waste heat couldn't be vented. Got all of space to blast it into. And, again, just because it's based on actual technology doesn't mean it has to follow the same rules. This is fiction.

You can reuse the heat as energy I do believe.

The Satellite will continue to heat up until it is vaporized unless you actively remove heat from it somehow.

You are in space, and you don't have anything around the satellite because you are in a vacuum which is an amazing insulator. This means heat can only be removed through radiation.

Trying to move the heat around to create the energy will just create more heat as you have not gotten rid of the heat you started out with, moving the heat creates more heat, and you have to have something hotter in the first place to make the heat flow, eventually leading to your satellite vaporizing unless you actively radiate the heat away.

So no, you can not reuse the heat as energy, especially not if you are this close to a star.

Ohhh....you know....we've already done it on here. So yeaaaahhh....we can do it, on here. We do it IRL with simple RTG's via the Seeback Effect and thermocouples, and a star in some sense can be construed as a giant radioactive battery of heat. However, the issue with the close proximity to the star is entirely valid.

Actually, that was fixed when Wes re-did the cooling systems for the Plumeria. So no you can not destroy heat by converting it to energy.

Thermocouples also don't work like that. You would still have to actively cool the satellite or it would be vaporized. Using a thermocouple would only accelerate the rate at which the satellite was vaporized because it does not remove any heat from the system.

So, you are wrong on both counts.

Uh, no, I'm not. I like how you think you're right all the time, which you are not. Ever hear of a TEC? Seeing as the Seeback effect is also related to the Thomson, and Peltier effects, I would imagine someone would be thinking of how to cool this as well, Uso. I remember me preaching to you about common sense, and common sense would have someone say, "Hey, let's make a cooling system too." I'm not necessarily saying TEC cooling is efficient enough, which, it isn't, but, someone would think of how to keep the thing cool.


EDIT: TEG =TEC Brain fart on my part.

TEGs can't cool. I think I've posted this here a few times before too:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3au.html

Basically, you are still wrong. A thermocouple can not cool something. That is not how it works. You are mistakenly thinking that converting heat to electricity somehow gets rid of the heat, which it does not. In this case it would indeed only speed up the submission's destruction by the star at the distance Vesper was using for his math.

Look at my post again. I had to edit it. TEG = TEC. TEC's can cool things. They can be used to cool computer components, common coolers and the like. Like I said again, before you started to fire your "You're wrong, Victoly" cannon once more, TEC's may soon improve. I also stated, TEC's were not up to the bar. I also stated someone could find an alternate means to cool it. You're still hung up on Thermocouples. Move on, or you're redundancy will result in me starting to make your posts disappear.