Hi I have an idea floating around i've always wondered about.. Would it be possible to use the particle fountain concept to store kinetic energy? ie. use magnetically suspended ..uh physical magnets i guess, rather than beams... like a circular gauss rifle? I would suppose that this idea would become viable at some point as superconducting materials improve? what do you think?
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$\begingroup$ Possibly related: physics.stackexchange.com/q/93140/44126 $\endgroup$– rob ♦Commented Oct 22, 2016 at 4:37
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In order to create such a device, you should first of all reach an ultra-high vacuum, since any molecule in the path of the object would dissipate energy. Thus, you should use a really good vacuum pump (see how the LHC does it). This requires a big amount of energy, which is mainly lost in friction in the vacuum pump: it is a fixed energy cost operation.
Then, assuming that you managed to reach a ultra-high vacuum, you should accelerate particles so that they have a circular trajectory. This would need the use of strong electromagnets. Now, energy consumption of electromagnets could really be lowered by using superconducting materials, since the only energy consumption of an electromagnet is wasted through Joule effect. However, you need to cool a magnet to very low temperatures (below 5K usually) to get the desired effect, and cooling it down requires a lot of energy (around 5MW in the LHC)... This is a vicious cycle: the less the magnet consumes, the more energy is needed to cool it down. Yet, progress in superconductors could bring new solutions.
Finally, you should get back the stored energy. Currently, a similar method is used in particle accelerator, thanks to an energy recuperation linac, to "recycle" a proton beam energy in order to create another beam. Yet, it seems very unlikely that we could convert the energy of a beam into usable energy.
As a conclusion, I would say that even if we could have ultra efficient superconducting magnets whose energy consumption is almost null, you would still loose a lot of energy through heat dissipation, and most of all, you couldn't recover the energy you put in your particle accelerator...
