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Power Transportation Science Technology

First Ever Plane With No Moving Parts Takes Flight (theguardian.com) 264

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The first ever "solid state" plane, with no moving parts in its propulsion system, has successfully flown for a distance of 60 meters, proving that heavier-than-air flight is possible without jets or propellers. The flight represents a breakthrough in "ionic wind" technology, which uses a powerful electric field to generate charged nitrogen ions, which are then expelled from the back of the aircraft, generating thrust. Steven Barrett, an aeronautics professor at MIT and the lead author of the study published in the journal Nature, said the inspiration for the project came straight from the science fiction of his childhood.

In the prototype plane, wires at the leading edge of the wing have 600 watts of electrical power pumped through them at 40,000 volts. This is enough to induce "electron cascades", ultimately charging air molecules near the wire. Those charged molecules then flow along the electrical field towards a second wire at the back of the wing, bumping into neutral air molecules on the way, and imparting energy to them. Those neutral air molecules then stream out of the back of the plane, providing thrust. The end result is a propulsion system that is entirely electrically powered, almost silent, and with a thrust-to-power ratio comparable to that achieved by conventional systems such as jet engines.
"I was a big fan of Star Trek, and at that point I thought that the future looked like it should be planes that fly silently, with no moving parts -- and maybe have a blue glow," said Barrett. "But certainly no propellers or turbines or anything like that. So I started looking into what physics might make flight with no moving parts possible, and came across a concept known as the ionic wind, which was first investigated in the 1920s."

"This didn't make much progress in that time. It was looked at again in the 1950s, and researchers concluded that it couldn't work for aeroplanes. But I started looking into this and went through a period of about five years, working with a series of graduate students to improve fundamental understanding of how you could reduce ionic winds efficiently, and how that could be optimized."
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First Ever Plane With No Moving Parts Takes Flight

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @10:44PM (#57683074)

    This plane's wingspan is already five meters, for just 2.5kg of weight, most of it going to the battery pack. To make it carry more weight, one will have to make it much bigger, which will require much stronger wings, which will make it heavier. And to make things worse, batteries do not get lighter as they discharge.

    It's a great toy, but it will be a while before it is useful.

    • by Harlequin80 ( 1671040 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @10:51PM (#57683092)

      Agreed. 5m wing span at 2.5kg is extremely light with a massive lifting surface. 60m glide from a head height launch would be easy.

      But did it take off from standstill. Article is unclear. If it self launched that is far more interesting.

      • In the video it looks like it's bungee launched.

        • by dinfinity ( 2300094 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @11:05PM (#57683128)

          Yep. From the original paper ( https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com] ):
          "Owing to the limited length of the indoor space (60 m), we used a bungeed launch system to accelerate the aircraft from stationary to a steady flight velocity of 5 m/s within 5 m, and performed free flight in the remaining 55 m of flight space. "

          Besides the weight of the batteries, the main issue is this:
          "Although we have shown that EAD thrust density is sufficient at the scale of unmanned aerial vehicles, where the available ratio of frontal area to weight is high, it is not currently sufficient for high-speed flight at the scale of commercial aviation: the area thrust density of our aeroplane was 3 N/m^2, that of a typical conventional unmanned aerial vehicle is of the order of 10 N/m^2, and that of a modern civil airliner is of the order of 1000 N/m^2."

          Nevertheless it is really cool technology.

          • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Thursday November 22, 2018 @03:42AM (#57683580) Homepage

            EHD propulsion is well modeled, and it's just not possible to achieve a high thrust density per unit of propulsive surface area at reasonable efficiency. It's a more interesting concept for propulsion of lighter-than-air aircraft, where you have an extremely large surface are and can have your electrodes double as surface reinforcement. But the electrode longevity problems remain. So does ozone generation.

            On the upside, EHD propulsion is surprisingly efficient when surface area is not a limiting factor. You're moving a large mass of air at low velocity rather than a small mass of air at high velocity, which leads to higher propulsive efficiency.

      • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Thursday November 22, 2018 @04:00AM (#57683612)
        I wonder how that huge lifting surface would respond to moderate gusts of wind...
    • TFS says power to thrust is similar to other planes, so its as feasible as any electronic plane. Maybe with a hydrogen fuel cell?
    • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Thursday November 22, 2018 @12:06AM (#57683248) Journal

      > make it much bigger, which will require much stronger wings, which will make it heavier.

      Yeah with planes, if it barely works at small scale, it can't come close to working at a much larger scale. Specifically, doubling the length and width means the weight is eight times as much. It's easy to do things at model scale that are nearly impossible at full size.

      Imagine a plane with a rectangular fuselage 10x1x1. Its volume would be ten units, and the weight proportional. "Doubling the size" would be 20x2x2. That's 80 units of volume/weight! Doubling the size makes it 8 times heavier.

      I can easily scratch build a model plane from Dollar Tree materials that has a thrust to weight ratio greater than 1. Probably most models have 1 or better thrust to weight. At full scale, only some fighter jets have that kind of capability.

      The fact that scaling up by doubling the wingspan means 8 times as much weight means anything borderline capable at 5 meter wingspan because totally unusable at 10 meters. They'll need to either scale it up and show it works, or demo fighter jet level performance at 5 meters to show flight is possible at 10 meter wingspan.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday November 22, 2018 @04:34AM (#57683660) Homepage Journal

        Imagine a plane with a rectangular fuselage 10x1x1. Its volume would be ten units, and the weight proportional. "Doubling the size" would be 20x2x2.

        Doubling the size would be 20x1x1. That you allow you to carry twice as much cargo... Probably a lot more than 2x as much since the 10x1x1 aircraft would have fixed size equipment and mechanical stuff that doesn't scale proportionally.

        What you suggest is multiplying the size by 8. In practice very large aircraft are economical and not as impractical as your numbers would suggest. Per unit of cargo (e.g. per person) an A380 compares well to a small business jet.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by amorsen ( 7485 ) <benny+slashdot@amorsen.dk> on Thursday November 22, 2018 @03:28AM (#57683548)

      Screw useful.

      It flies without engines or motors!

      What has happened to Slashdot, dreams from our childhoods unexpectedly become possible, and we go "meh, I checked the timetable at Heathrow for tomorrow, none of those fly with ionic engines".

      Just to make it worse, when the first commercial flight of ionic engines happens, we'll go "meh, old tech, this professor showed it in 2018 already. Why is there no innovation anymore?"

      • by leomekenkamp ( 566309 ) on Thursday November 22, 2018 @07:34AM (#57683998)

        Off topic, but it is a generational thing. Judging from your ID I take it you are the same age as I am, or older. I only applied for an account after reading slashdot for quite some months/years...

        Anyway, we are of the same age or you are older. Which means that you can remember a world without internet access on your phone. Or internet access in your home. Or internet access at university or some Initech. Or internet at all. When you needed information, you needed to go to the library, or look it up in an encyclopedia or ask someone else.

        If you wanted to make an appointment with someone, you had to plan in advance instead of calling ad-hoc. If you wanted to meet someone at a venue, you would have to plan in advance, because, hey, no mobile phones. You needed to keep an eye out for each other or assign a meeting point for when someone got lost.

        You had to go to a shop to buy something, go to some desk to rent something. You probably even needed to plan to have enough money on you, but not too much.

        Hell, even running punch cards through a computer and getting the results could take hours.

        Long story short: everything took longer. Now so much is instantaneous. Your mind got wired when everything took longer. The internet generation has gotten their minds wired in an environment were everything is near-instant. They are not used to waiting, because they have never waited. Not like you and me. I think that is a significant factor in the change you have noticed here on slashdot.

        We are getting old. We have skills, like patience and parallelization/pipe-lining, that are not really needed anymore. We see the 'young' without these once essential skills and get more or less annoyed at the behaviour they show without these skills.

        So yeah: screw useful! This is heavy nerdy shit. This is why I visit slashdot.

      • I've got to agree. I think it's an 'engineer' response though - instead of "yes, we can do that", the engineer thinks of all the problems they're gonna have to fix and talks about them instead.

        However, I too think this is pretty cool. It might not be useful as it stands, but then neither is lots of other tech we have - most of it is just about learning what to do next time.

        I seem to remember the first ion based engines having micro-newtons of thrust, so the tech has clearly gone a long way since then. Batte

        • I've got to agree. I think it's an 'engineer' response though - instead of "yes, we can do that", the engineer thinks of all the problems they're gonna have to fix and talks about them instead.

          Hold on. Looking at problems is great. I see a lot of "This will never work" from slashdotters, rather than "Hey - how do we solve this problem to make it work".

          The engineer needs to get excited about problems to fix. And scientists are downright gleeful about problems to figure out. That's why they laugh at news stories that try to sound like some new discovery has them all perplexed and upset. More the opposite.

          Too many people in here have attitudes that would have kept us in mud huts. Because "Som

      • by Kohath ( 38547 )

        Just to make it worse, when the first commercial flight of ionic engines happens, we'll go "meh, old tech, this professor showed it in 2018 already. Why is there no innovation anymore?"

        They'll complain that it pollutes their air with ions and that the batteries are made with materials that need to be mined. And it still uses energy, which should be saved for future generations (who also won't be allowed to use it because they'll also have to save it). Stay on the ground, huddled under blankets in the dark. For the Earth. That's what they'll say.

    • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      Not to mention how much more electricity would it need to work at higher altitudes where the air is not as dense?
    • It may not scale UP well, but for all those reasons it might scale down better.
      No, it may never be adequate for human flight, but surely in 2018 the advantages of solid-state, silent, efficient electrical propulsion of drones should be obvious?

    • And to make things worse, batteries do not get lighter as they discharge.

      And to make things better, they don't start off heavier.

  • by Harlequin80 ( 1671040 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @10:48PM (#57683086)

    I would be fascinated to know how much thrust that is producing. How variable the thrust is etc.

    Does the thrust increase with airspeed? I'd get about 2 mins of flight time on those numbers with a standard battery I use in my wings. But I get about 10-15 mins of flight depending on how much I'm caning it.

  • by clovis ( 4684 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @11:00PM (#57683116)

    In my dream world, this would be used to silently propel solar-powered zeppelins around the world. The zeppelin's buoyancy would support the weight of the batteries used for night-time propulsion.
    Of course the problem with that is lithium batteries well-known flammability. But what's the odds of something going wrong with something a simple as a zeppelin?

    • by clovis ( 4684 )

      I forgot to ask, how well would this work in the rain? Or even fog for that matter.

      • It wont work at all, it will short out. These are using high voltage low amp power, its always looking for an excuse to short out.
        These are essentially old school corona wires used in copiers/printers, and will eventually corrode and lose efficiency.
        As an added bonus they attract dirt and dust further reducing efficiency. If you ever cleaned one of those ionic breeze air purifiers charge assembly, you will know what I mean.

    • by 6Yankee ( 597075 )

      Blimpin' ain't easy...

  • by SensitiveMale ( 155605 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @11:11PM (#57683140)

    Because their air cleaners were the first thing I thought of.

  • Neat (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Compuser ( 14899 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @11:13PM (#57683142)

    I cannot see this as immediately useful for plane construction but I can imagine some uses for it. Most notably, one could power this from a real fuel-powered motor rather than a battery and use it as a secondary propulsion mechanism. So for example, this could maybe eliminate the second rotor on choppers (which is a source of major mechanical complexity and does not do much lifting, just torque balancing).

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I can. Solar powered, near maintenance free, silent drones.

      Just up there forever, hovering, watching, doing gods know what.

    • So for example, this could maybe eliminate the second rotor on choppers (which is a source of major mechanical complexity and does not do much lifting, just torque balancing).

      In theory, maybe; you can make a turbine engine into a generator easily enough. But you can already eliminate the external second rotor on choppers with NOTAR, either by putting the fan inside of the tail rotor or by ducting a portion of the turbine exhaust out of the tail for this purpose. It's not clear that it would make more sense to add an electrical system to do this job. There's already a mechanical system in there which can do it.

  • I'm no MIT student, (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @11:14PM (#57683146)

    This looks a lot like the Ionic lifters that were popular in the "anti gravity" circles about 15 years ago. I built a few and they were fun to build, but there isn't any anti-gravity going on here just ion wind. The high voltage was entertaining and the corona was beautiful when the lights were turned off.

    The folks at MIT are doing great things. I love it!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biefeld–Brown_effect

    • by LionKimbro ( 200000 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @11:49PM (#57683216) Homepage

      "Lifters." First thought that came to my head!

      It was really instructive for me, to watch the process unfold:
      1. People started proclaiming that they had UFO and anti-grav technology.
      2. The scientific community said, "No, you don't."
      3. People started posting videos of their "lifters."
      4. People were scratching their heads. Many people said, "These must be photoshopped."
      5. After a time, scientific community started researching what these things are.
      6. Scientific community responds with, "OK, we've looked at this, and: It's ionic breeze."

      I saw this as an interesting interaction between the public (eager to have anti-grav tech, or something from UFOs, or whatever,) and the scientific community (eager to fight against the forces of ignorance and superstition.)

      Lessons I took from it are:
      * The scientific community gets it right, eventually, and provides what it knows after some study. (It's trustworthy.)
      * Sometimes the public has something interesting, even if the scientific community initially says "no." (It's sometimes worth paying attention to the public, but not at face value if the public is on some crazy interpretation.)

      • by Ozoner ( 1406169 )

        Lifters and Ion wind devices were studied in detail by NASA and MIT.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        My recollection was that Lifter experimenters knew right fro the start that it was "Ionic Currents" which propelled them.
        I don't recall any controversy about the fundamental principle.

      • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
        It's a good thing that scientists are not easily convinced of anything. It encourages proof and continued experimentation. Imagine if scientists went around believing any old thing...
  • by mcswell ( 1102107 ) on Thursday November 22, 2018 @12:25AM (#57683296)

    "The order is: engage the silent drive." --Captain Marko Ramius

  • by ClarkMills ( 515300 ) on Thursday November 22, 2018 @12:32AM (#57683314)

    ...your hair would stand on end...

  • The first real plane flight wasn't very long either, but it at least carried the weight of a real person.

    It's my understanding that Ionic wind doesn't scale very well, and probably can't work for anything larger than a very lightweight toy.

  • by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Thursday November 22, 2018 @04:09AM (#57683620)

    Is it plausibly useful for very high altitude drones, mars aircraft and the like? What is the effective exhaust velocity? eg is there any regime where it is more efficient than an electric motor and propeller?

    Still its a cute concept, even if it isn't practical.

  • by Voxol ( 32200 ) on Thursday November 22, 2018 @04:42AM (#57683676)

    Fixed that for ya'.

  • Could this technology also be used as an alternative to the rotating blades currently used in fans? Fans are everywhere, and if this system can scale down effectively and run quieter and more efficient it can have uses in air conditioning, ventilation systems, refrigerators, cars, desktop/laptop computer cooling, basically anywhere we need air to move.

  • You've got to watch the five-minute video the designer has on YouTube. The best part of the whole thing is how clunky and "garage kiddies" the plane looks, and how they tested it in a local school gym. I couldn't care less whether or not it's practical at the moment. The first automobiles were sometimes followed around by farmers with horse-drawn wagons full of tires and tools, because they were so prone to breakdowns, flats and just plain uselessness.

    Here's a link:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boB6q

  • by Pete McCann ( 1949942 ) on Thursday November 22, 2018 @10:30AM (#57684456) Homepage
    Can you reverse the principle to make a solid state windmill that generates power with no moving parts?

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell

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