Mach Effect MEGA Thruster

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Flyaway

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Dr. Heidi Fearn's NIAC presentation is now on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLs9NEt9LRQ

poster 41 mb
http://ssi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/SSI_NIAC2017_Poster.pdf

slides 37mb
http://ssi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/SSI_NIAC2017_Slides.pdf

Q&A 10mb
http://ssi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/SSI_NIAC2017_QandA.pdf
 
Phase II NIAC Grant Selection for SSI.

Mach Effect for In Space Propulsion: Interstellar Mission

We propose to study the implementation of an innovative thrust producing technology for use in NASA missions involving in space main propulsion. Mach Effect Gravity Assist (MEGA) drive propulsion is based on peer-reviewed, technically credible physics. Mach effects are transient variations in the rest masses of objects that simultaneously experience accelerations and internal energy changes. They are predicted by standard physics where Mach's principle applies as discussed in peer- reviewed papers spanning 20 years and a recent book, Making Starships and Stargates: the Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes published in 2013 by Springer-Verlag.

In Phase I we achieved the following:

Implemented chirped pulses to reduce heating and provide a longer duration thrust capability.
Designed and developed circuits to allow for 1f and 2f frequency impedance matched AC input to the device, to improve efficiency of the MEGA drive.
Developed a better theoretical model for the device and conceptualized a probe for an interstellar mission to Proxima b. In Phase II, the next critical step in the development of these thrusters is to test new designs with higher frequency to increase the output thrust.
We have been using Steiner Martin's SM-111 PZT for our devices. We also expect to test new materials, for example APC-840 PZT, and PIN-PMN-PT, which we have procured but not had the opportunity to yet evaluate. It would also be advantageous to operate multiple devices to determine the thrust scales in arrays of 2 or more devices. We view the independent verification of the MEGA Drive effects by experts in the vacuum testing of micropropulsion as a crucial step in Phase II. We envision a collaboration with several entities (from academia and industry) to enable the testing of new devices. Mach effects have the revolutionary capability to produce thrust without the ejection of propellant, eliminating the need to carry propellant as required with most other propulsion systems. Ultimately, once proven in flight, these thrusters could be used for primary mission propulsion, opening up the solar system and making interstellar missions a reality. This aerospace concept is an exciting TRL 1 technology, ready to take the next step to providing propellantless propulsion, first in incremental NASA smallsat missions, but later enabling revolutionary new deep space exploratory capabilities beyond anything achievable by conventional chemical, nuclear or electric propulsion systems.

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2018_Phase_I_Phase_II/Mach_Effect_for_In_Space_Propulsion_Interstellar_Mission
 
Lengthy article looking at the Mach Effect thruster and the latest news. Unlike EM drives you don’t have to invent new physics to explain their working.

Mach Effect Propellantless drive gets NIAC phase 2 and progress towards great interstellar propulsion

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/04/mach-effect-propellantless-drive-gets-niac-phase-2-and-progress-to-great-interstellar-propulsion.html
 
New pre-print paper.

The SpaceDrive Project - First Results on EMDrive and Mach-Effect Thrusters

Propellantless propulsion is believed to be the best option for interstellar travel. However, photon rockets or solar sails have thrusts so low that maybe only nano-scaled spacecraft may reach the next star within our lifetime using very high-power laser beams. Following into the footsteps of earlier breakthrough propulsion programs, we are investigating different concepts based on non-classical/revolutionary propulsion ideas that claim to be at least an order of magnitude more efficient in producing thrust compared to photon rockets. Our intention is to develop an excellent research infrastructure to test new ideas and measure thrusts and/or artefacts with high confidence to determine if a concept works and if it does how to scale it up. At present, we are focusing on two possible revolutionary concepts: The EMDrive and the Mach-Effect Thruster. The first concept uses microwaves in a truncated cone-shaped cavity that is claimed to produce thrust. Although it is not clear on which theoretical basis this can work, several experimental tests have been reported in the literature, which warrants a closer examination. The second concept is believed to generate mass fluctuations in a piezo-crystal stack that creates non-zero time-averaged thrusts. Here we are reporting first results of our improved thrust balance as well as EMDrive and Mach-Effect thruster models. Special attention is given to the investigation and identification of error sources that cause false thrust signals. Our results show that the magnetic interaction from not sufficiently shielded cables or thrusters are a major factor that needs to be taken into account for proper µN thrust measurements for these type of devices.
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The SpaceDrive Project - First Results on... (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325177082_The_SpaceDrive_Project_-_First_Results_on_EMDrive_and_Mach-Effect_Thrusters
 
Article on Ars-Technica, which also covers the EM-Drive. Apologies for the sarcasm.

It was bound to happen eventually. A group of researchers that may actually be competent and well-funded is investigating alternative thrust concepts. This includes our favorite, the WTF-thruster EM-drive, as well as something called a Mach-Effect thruster. The results, presented at Space Propulsion 2018, are pretty much as expected: a big fat meh.
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https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/nasas-em-drive-is-a-magnetic-wtf-thruster/?comments=1
 
Marc Millis on Mach Effect Thruster, EmDrive Tests

by PAUL GILSTER on JUNE 18, 2018
Marc Millis spent the summer of 2017 at the Technische Universität Dresden, where he taught a class called Introduction to Interstellar Flight and Propulsion Physics, a course he would also teach at Purdue University last November. The former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project and founding architect of the Tau Zero Foundation, Marc participated in the SpaceDrive project run by Martin Tajmar in Dresden, an effort that has been in the news with its laboratory testing of two controversial propulsion concepts: The Mach Effect Thruster and the EmDrive. Marc’s review comments on modeling for the former were almost as long as Tajmar’s draft paper. Described below, the SpaceDrive project is a wider effort that includes more than these two areas — neither the EmD or MET thruster had reached active test phase during the summer he was there — but the ongoing work on both occupies Millis in the essay that follows.
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My bolding.

You may have noticed a renewed burst of articles about the EmDrive. What prompted this round of coverage was an interim report, part of the progress on Martin Tajmar’s ‘SpaceDrive’ project to carefully test such claims. Tajmar’s conference paper [citation below] is one of the early steps to check for false-positives. I expect more papers to follow, each progressing to other possibilities. It might take a year or so more before irrefutable results are in. Until then, treat the press stories about certain conclusions as highly suspect.
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https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2018/06/18/marc-millis-on-mach-effect-thruster-emdrive-tests/

Notice that the Mach Effect thruster is looking to be a very different beast than the EM Drive. I imagine this is a attempted corrective article to some of the poor press reporting.
 
A Machian wave effect in conformal, scalar–tensor gravitational theory



A frequency-dependent Machian effect previously put forward by Woodward (that for a body undergoing mass–energy fluctuations, the second time derivative of the mass–energy density is a source of a gravitational field) is discussed within Einstein’s theory and justified using Hoyle–Narlikar’s conformal gravitational theory. It is shown that Einstein’s theory has a similar term that is 3rd order post-Newtonian, but besides the issue of coordinate-dependence, the Machian significance of any field term in Einstein’s equation depends on the (universe’s) cosmological solution to the field equations. Therefore, Woodward’s theory is examined within Hoyle–Narlikar’s scalar–tensor theory of gravitation (a theory that was expressly developed with the intent to incorporate Mach’s principle) for a universe undergoing accelerating expansion (hereby accounted for by a positive cosmological constant). It is shown under gauge invariant expressions that the conformal, scalar–tensor gravitational theory of Hoyle and Narlikar has a similar term of first order when the mass–energy fluctuation is due to distant objects but that it effectively becomes a higher order effect when the mass–energy fluctuations arise from fluctuation of the (local) mass–energy (as is necessarily the case in Woodward’s experimental results, since the only mass that can be purposively fluctuated in energy, monochromatically, is the local mass, instead of the distant masses responsible for most of the inertia according to Mach’s principle). Therefore this effect appears too small for practical space travel application (unless the spaceship is near a black hole or a neutron star). Present cosmological measurements of the possible time variation of G are shown to occur at much lower frequencies and therefore cannot be used to rule out Woodward’s effect if G exhibits significant time-dependence at higher frequencies than observed in these cosmological measurements.



Full paper:



 
www.sciencedirect.com

The SpaceDrive project - Thrust balance development and new measurements of the Mach-Effect and EMDrive Thrusters

Forces claimed by potential propellantless propulsion systems like the Mach-Effect-Thruster or the EMDrive are in the μN or even sub-μN range. In this…
www.sciencedirect.com www.sciencedirect.com

www.scientificamerican.com

The Good Kind of Crazy: The Quest for Exotic Propulsion

Traditional rockets won't get us to the stars. Some scientists are pushing against the edges of physics to find out what will
www.scientificamerican.com www.scientificamerican.com
 
"...final Woodward/Mach Effect propulsion report for NIAC Phase II"

Some very clever engineering, a duly-wary eye for potential oopsies, but output seems to be stuck 'down in the noise'...

Have I missed the meat ??
 
Just 20 years or so late (in the original Star Trek timeline, impulse thrusters were invented in the 1990s).
 
Are there any other sources? The story is just that headline and nothing else when I click.
 

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....it was a video?!

I wanted a link to a science paper! Even just the names of the scientists and their research lab would have been enough!
 
It was the video that went with the article, I think. Still trying to track down a more detailed article or background material.
 
Grey Havoc said:
It was the video that went with the article, I think. Still trying to track down a more detailed article or background material.
Click to expand...
Thank you. Sorry I squawked so loudly. It's annoying to click an article and have it collapse into nothing while being absolutely cloying worse than any cotton candy ever.
 
I noticed Grey Havoc never was able to find that followup to this story. No steak and taters to be had here, just cloying cotton candy that leaves you hungry after it collapses faster than you can bite into it.
 
I really wish I could buy into this. Two asides: a few weeks back phys.org had a blurb about dark energy and the sun's magnetism. Today's phys.org went the other way with a new MOND theory that talked about a missing scalar component to gravity...and another article earlier this week hinting at a new physics. I don't know if this can be folded into propellant free propulsion. I think materials research beyond roughly hewn frustams may be needed. Nanowerk had a bit on energetic ferroelectrics that I initially thought might also point the way toward "chemonuclear rockets' like NSF's 2-25-2015 article of the same name....now I wonder if nanotech could deliver a wave of chirality flipping for a judder drive. I know-word salad.
 
Sadly, the Mach and EM 'propellant-less' drive seem to have gone the way of 'N-Rays'.
en.wikipedia.org

N-ray - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

As a scientist and former member of British Interplanetary Society, I'm both relieved and disappointed...

And, despite sundry woosters' claims, the 'electric wind' used to propel several lightweight model aircraft only works in atmosphere...

Bona-fide 'Ion Drives' are real but, again despite sundry woosters, do require propellant. May be high atomic-number element so very dense compared to eg cryo' H2/O2, which just means 'fuel tank' is much smaller. Typically, very high Isp, but very modest thrust...

As you say, there's been a spate of MOND and more arcane cosmological notions that remove need for Dark Energy, Dark Mass etc.

IIRC, some-one's dusted off Einstein's long-abandoned take on gravity & space/time that sought to use 'twisted dents' rather than merely 'dents'. Seems the math looks much better this time around...

How this could be tested, never mind applied / controlled hurts my wits to consider. Would seem akin to the long, long pursuit of quarks, Higgs, neutrinos and gravitational waves.

Of course, just as 'Hot Jupiters' were discovered in scary abundance via Optical Doppler just a few years after unfortunate Peter Van de Kamp's patient photographic astrometry failed, or 'magic angle' bi-layers exhibit 'anomalous' superconductivity, something unexpected may emerge...

Down-side, the notion that gravity may involve twists, twirls or other sorta-rotary motion will surely bring the 'Dean Drive' and related whatnots out of the woodwork, yet again, yet again... :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
 
Last week's 'New Scientist' had an article on this approach, termed 'teleparallel'.

I've now read it a dozen more times, and my head hurts...

So, hunted around for other reports.

Teleparallelism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10055604/ {Open access PDF !!}

As I understand it, if 'General Relativity' winds up space/time one way, you get electro-magnetism, and another way, gravity. As yet, the elegant math comes in several 'threads', each of which can only solve 3 of the 4 big cosmological problems.
( Not as scary as the zillion 'free parameters' faced by some versions of 'String Theory', but... )

Downside, there seems no way to grasp 'teleparallel' without a bucket of 'Greek Alphabet Noodle Soup'.

Upside, seems 'teleparallel' approach is only MOND-ish take to survive that 'recent' supernova's flash and gravitational waves arriving at same time. Those MOND flavours that predicted an offset are now considered 'broken' rather than 'totally falsified'...

Flip-side, bears watching...
 
Until then…I’m still pushing for UberLLVs the size of the Chrysler Building…
 
Am close friends with one of the investigators (a member of Woodward's team) who is testing several of their most recent models. I have to be cagey about how I describe what I've seen. I can say that they are employing a method for removing friction from their best units (as they are oscillators, and have to touch something to keep them aligned while moving back and forth.) They also are working with existing tech (although mechanically very complicated) that can better "display" the units in action. All of that vagary aside, seeing is believing, and (IF) the set up I was looking at (I was sent video) is not by dint of it's design creating motion of the units being tested, then MEGA drive is indeed a very real thing. It is astonishing to look at: in appearance the movement is so real I went about exclaiming to the team member that there is a good deal of tech available for protecting a space "ships"/probes while travelling at relativistic velocities.
As is known the MEGA drive tech is out at/to various institutions to see if the experiments are reproducible, and if memory serves, one outside entity has already met with success. Fingers are crossed that the effect is reproducible all around so's we no longer have to fool with throwing mass out the backend to move forward. , Kevin Hambsch
PS: I'll ask my friend if I can make any disclosures at this time... we'll see what they say. K
 
KHambsch said:
Am close friends with one of the investigators (a member of Woodward's team) who is testing several of their most recent models. I have to be cagey about how I describe what I've seen. I can say that they are employing a method for removing friction from their best units (as they are oscillators, and have to touch something to keep them aligned while moving back and forth.) They also are working with existing tech (although mechanically very complicated) that can better "display" the units in action. All of that vagary aside, seeing is believing, and (IF) the set up I was looking at (I was sent video) is not by dint of it's design creating motion of the units being tested, then MEGA drive is indeed a very real thing. It is astonishing to look at: in appearance the movement is so real I went about exclaiming to the team member that there is a good deal of tech available for protecting a space "ships"/probes while travelling at relativistic velocities.
As is known the MEGA drive tech is out at/to various institutions to see if the experiments are reproducible, and if memory serves, one outside entity has already met with success. Fingers are crossed that the effect is reproducible all around so's we no longer have to fool with throwing mass out the backend to move forward. , Kevin Hambsch
PS: I'll ask my friend if I can make any disclosures at this time... we'll see what they say. K
Click to expand...
OK, I mailed and requested the files and she sent them to me (again)....couldn't locate the same ones she sent to me before. These are mega drive thrusters on an air table. I understand air is also being used as frictionless bearings in the mega drive units themselves to mitigate the friction in the oscillators. Here we go....
 
KHambsch said:
KHambsch said:
Am close friends with one of the investigators (a member of Woodward's team) who is testing several of their most recent models. I have to be cagey about how I describe what I've seen. I can say that they are employing a method for removing friction from their best units (as they are oscillators, and have to touch something to keep them aligned while moving back and forth.) They also are working with existing tech (although mechanically very complicated) that can better "display" the units in action. All of that vagary aside, seeing is believing, and (IF) the set up I was looking at (I was sent video) is not by dint of it's design creating motion of the units being tested, then MEGA drive is indeed a very real thing. It is astonishing to look at: in appearance the movement is so real I went about exclaiming to the team member that there is a good deal of tech available for protecting a space "ships"/probes while travelling at relativistic velocities.
As is known the MEGA drive tech is out at/to various institutions to see if the experiments are reproducible, and if memory serves, one outside entity has already met with success. Fingers are crossed that the effect is reproducible all around so's we no longer have to fool with throwing mass out the backend to move forward. , Kevin Hambsch
PS: I'll ask my friend if I can make any disclosures at this time... we'll see what they say. K
Click to expand...
OK, I mailed and requested the files and she sent them to me (again)....couldn't locate the same ones she sent to me before. These are mega drive thrusters on an air table. I understand air is also being used as frictionless bearings in the mega drive units themselves to mitigate the friction in the oscillators. Here we go....
Click to expand...
 
Doesn't look like they want to load. Please email me and I can attach them to the mail.
While I recognize there are problems with air tables and air bearings for that matter where experimental artifact/error is concerned, the videos are quite impressive.... IMO. Kevin
kylebear2000@hotmail.com
 
They just won't attach mp4 and other formats. Will be happy to send them to anyone...plz use the above email address. Kevin
 

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