www.telegraph.co.uk
www.nature.com
www.secretprojects.co.uk
Hello, hole in the ground, I'm unable to open this doc, do you have it in a different format or other. Thnx. Kevin
Am wondering if the terms EHD and MHD are intended to mean the same thing, or? As to the Japanese ship, I understood that to be an example of Magnetohydrodynamics where the term Electrohydrodynamic is something different. I know thr ship worked cuz ocean (salt) water is conductive. Now I have to study this.
Magnetohydrodynamics is the interaction of magnetic fields with electrically charged (ionised) fluids. Electrohydrodynamics is the interaction of electric fields with those same fluids.
Yikes, had to copy this out of the text. I've been working with gasses that are aready ionized, so creation of a/the magnetic field is what I think I understand. Here's the text:
Nicknick and steelpillow, did you read what it posted recently of super fast solar wind sailing? Did I get it right? ....explaining it. Kevin
www.gamestar.de
no, I"m going to bed.... (can be deleted...)
Yep! Lorentz and/or Laplace force real, Biefield-Brown not so much.
Sawyer is 110% woo - take it from a seasoned EM pro. Ion lifters work but are pathetically weak; the principle has long been used for ion thrusters in space, but is nothing more than a fragile toy back down in the gravity well.
A fascinating attempt to rewrite fundamental physics, along with a dozen others. Extrapolating it to the real world is on a par with wormholes, time travel, Boltzmann brains and doppelgagers in parallel universes. To parallel the old saying "not even wrong", I'd suggest that it is not even woo.
I was attempting to garner a better understanding about difference between EHD and MHD.Star Trek-style 'ionic wind' plane hailed as most significant advance in flight since the Wright brothers
A revolutionary Star Trek-style electric plane that flies silently and has no moving parts has completed its first test flight, in what is being hailed as one of the most significant advances in flight since the early experiments of the Wright brother more than 100 years ago.
Star Trek-style 'ionic wind' plane hailed as most significant advance in flight since the Wright brothers
ByJamie Merrill21
November 2018 • 6:00pm
A revolutionary Star Trek-style electric plane that flies silently and has no moving parts has completed its first test flight, in what is being hailed as one of the most significant advances in flight since the early experiments of the Wright brother more than 100 years ago.
The battery-powered plane, which was developed and tested by engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, is not kept in flight by propellers or a turbine but by an ionic wind system.
The 16ft aircraft is completely silent and colliding electrically charged air molecules provide the thrust needed to make it fly, opening the door to new generation of emissions-free passenger aircraft and silent drones.
Professor Steven Barrett, lead researcher on the project at MIT in Massachusetts, told the Telegraph that the plane’s first flight, which is detailed in the journal Nature, was “super exciting”.
The battery-powered plane, which was developed and tested by engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is powered by an ionic wind system
He said: “This is the first time an aeroplane with no moving parts has flown. It’s taken nine years of work to get here, and it’s a hundred years since the ionic wind was first discovered”.
In the tests, the battery-powered unmanned aircraft, that weighs just five pounds, managed sustained flights of 197 ft in an MIT gym hall.
Professor Barrett was inspired to launch the project after watching sci-fi series Star Trek as a child. He was especially impressed by the show's futuristic shuttle crafts that skimmed through space with "just a blue glow and silently glide".
The project was inspired by the shuttlecraft featued in sci-fi series Star Trek CREDIT: Sportsphoto Agency
"This made me think, in the long-term future, planes shouldn't have propellers and turbines," he said. "They should be more like the shuttles in Star Trek."
Ionic wind, also known as electroaerodynamic thrust, was first identified in the 1920s and explored by scientists and engineers in the US and at Britain’s Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough in the 1960s, but they were only able to produce very low levels of thrust, insufficient for flight.
To overcome this obstacle, the MIT test aircraft carries an array of thin wires strung beneath the front end of its wings. A high voltage current passed through the wires via a lightweight power converter strips negatively charged electrons from surrounding air molecules.
This produces a cloud of positively charged ionised air molecules that are attracted to another set of negatively charged wires at the back of the plane, like a giant magnet attracting iron filings
As they flow towards the negative charge, the ions collide millions of times with other air molecules, creating the thrust that pushes the aircraft forward.
One of the biggest challenges faced by the MIT team was designing a power supply that would generate 40,000 volts from the plane's battery output, one of the biggest stumbling blocks in adapting the technology for large-scale commercial use.
Prof Barrett told the Telegraph that while it will take “several decades” for the technology to be advanced enough to power passenger aircraft, unmanned aircraft with wingspan of up to 80 ft will be possible in the "nearer term".
The silent aircraft has obvious applications as a stealth drone, as it would not be detected by infrared scanners. Defence giant Lockheed Martin has reportedly already expressed interest in the project.
Guy Gratton, an aerospace engineer and visiting professor at Cranfield University, said: “It's clearly very early days: but the team at MIT have done something we never previously knew was possible, in using accelerated ionised gas to propel an aircraft.
“Aeronautical engineers around the world are already trying hard to find ways to use electric propulsion, and this technology will offer something else that in the future may allow manned and unmanned aircraft to be more efficient, and non-polluting.”
Ionic-assisted flight using something like those NASA solar ultra-endurance UAVs is an interesting prospect. Not sure that would be enough to generate the necessary voltage, though. I do wonder if you could use it as a sort of auxiliary lift generator on a normal aircraft, just to push the performance envelope that much further. Envisioning something like the active boundary layer control on the ShinMaywa seaplanes driven by a separate compressor engine.
),As an aside, this principle of flight seems to be strictly limited to be used by humans, if at all. But during breakfast,
I was just reading the latest issue of the German Spektrum magazine (my wife is reading her newspaper then , too ..
featuring an article about the well known flying spiders, mainly seen during the times of the Indian Summer. For a long time, their abilty to lift off was reasoned by some kind of wind currents, but actually, they are using the natural electric
field in the atmosphere, too, though the principles aren't fully understood still yet.
As an aside, this principle of flight seems to be strictly limited to be used by humans, if at all. But during breakfast,
I was just reading the latest issue of the German Spektrum magazine (my wife is reading her newspaper then , too ..
featuring an article about the well known flying spiders, mainly seen during the times of the Indian Summer. For a long time, their abilty to lift off was reasoned by some kind of wind currents, but actually, they are using the natural electric
field in the atmosphere, too, though the principles aren't fully understood still yet.
Again, the problem is scaling up. Giant electrically-charged flying spiders, descending on hapless virgins with lightning belching forth from their legs, what a great black-and-white B-movie that would make!
