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."
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."
This does not scale well (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This does not scale well (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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In the video it looks like it's bungee launched.
Re:This does not scale well (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:This does not scale well (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:This does not scale well (Score:4, Interesting)
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Depending on how rigid it is it would make an amazing slope soarer. Basically stay airborne forever
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Cube the weight to double the size - scale kills (Score:5, Informative)
> 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.
Re:Cube the weight to double the size - scale kill (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Large planes are possible, small ones are easy (Score:2)
> Doubling the size would be 20x1x1. That you allow you to carry twice as much cargo...
If you had an aircraft design at 10x10x1 and tried to scale up the design by only doubling the length, without doubling everything else, it a) wouldn't fly and b) would probably fold in the middle before it made it to the runway.
You can see why if you take it to the extreme and imagine an aircraft 100 feet long, 1 foot wide and 1 foot high. It's obviously not going to be strong enough. Doubling length doubles the lever
Squaring the wing area cubes the weight (Score:2)
Btw probably the most important design criteria is wing area . If you scale up a design by doubling length, width, and height, you have squared the wing area and therefore the weight carrying capacity. But you've cubed the weight.
Re:Cube the weight to double the size - scale kill (Score:4, Informative)
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Ah yes, good example.
You actually DO double the wall strength / weight (Score:3)
> You build a bigger plane, but don't double wall thickness of your material.
Actually you DO have to double the strength of the walls, and square the strength of certain joints. That's because you've doubled, squared, and cubed the loads they have to withstand.
Consider the wing. A wing 20x2x2 is 8 times as much material as a 10x1x1 wing. Where the wing attaches to the fuselage, a wing root 2 units long is only twice as long as one 1 units. You've only doubled the number of fasteners but multiplied, so
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Re:This does not scale well (Score:5, Insightful)
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?"
Re:This does not scale well (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: This does not scale well (Score:2)
Your mind got wired when everything took longer.
...and required more effort.
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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
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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
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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.
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Re: This does not scale well (Score:3)
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?
Re: This does not scale well (Score:2)
And to make things worse, batteries do not get lighter as they discharge.
And to make things better, they don't start off heavier.
Re:This does not scale well (Score:5, Interesting)
Same thing was said about the Wright Brothers little effort.
The Wright Brothers' plane carried the weight of a man (Orville), and accelerated from zero under its own power.
To be fair, it also had a strong headwind, while this solid state plane flew in zero wind.
But the Wright Brother's Flyer had a clear path to improvement with lighter and more powerful engines.
Where can this SS tech go? Batteries will get lighter, but no where near enough to give this plane a practical payload or range.
Re:This does not scale well (Score:5, Funny)
Batteries will get lighter, but no where near enough to give this plane a practical payload or range.
which one of Nostradamus' quatrains did you get that from?
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Right. Battery technology improvement is currently in the crosshairs for many industries, and the market keeps growing.
The only limitations I can to acknowledge are those of theoretical physics; wake me when we are bumping up against those.
Re:This does not scale well (Score:5, Insightful)
A long, long time ago when I was learning EE from an even older textbook I recall something about capacitance.
There were no large volume capacitors at the time the author was at university. The book discussed the oddity of the farad unit. Theoretically one could have made a one farad capacitor with the best materials but would encompass most of the Empire State Building in volume. That always stuck with me. Today you can buy a one farad 12v capacitor off amazon about the size of a water bottle, but have width to height ratios remarkably similar to the Empire State Building.
The point to remember is that limitations imposed by theoretical physicists are tentative at best. Remember, physics without empirical evidence isn't science and isn't necessarily reflective of reality.
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But your one-farad capacitor comes with a limitation that most capacitors don't have—it'll undergo dielectric breakdown if you applied more than 12 volts (or 12 volts plus some engineering margin). Most capacitors you find in your electronics components drawer have somewhere between 50 to 200 volts rating.
Overcoming one limit often involves a trade-off in another limit (for a more fundamental example, consider squeezed light [wikipedia.org]). For this airplane, it has already made some of the trade-offs (wingspan per
Re: This does not scale well (Score:4, Interesting)
it's not even just a question of batteries; it's a question of efficiency. From what I can tell this is far less efficient than a propeller. Even if batteries get orders of magnitude better it would make far more sense to just transition to electrically driven propellers and/or fans.
tl;dr there are multiple technologies which need to improve before this could be a viable propulsion method, let alone provide any actual advantage.
Re: This does not scale well (Score:5, Informative)
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A long, long time ago when I was learning EE from an even older textbook I recall something about capacitance.
There were no large volume capacitors at the time the author was at university. The book discussed the oddity of the farad unit. Theoretically one could have made a one farad capacitor with the best materials but would encompass most of the Empire State Building in volume. That always stuck with me. Today you can buy a one farad 12v capacitor off amazon about the size of a water bottle, but have width to height ratios remarkably similar to the Empire State Building.
The point to remember is that limitations imposed by theoretical physicists are tentative at best. Remember, physics without empirical evidence isn't science and isn't necessarily reflective of reality.
so the wings need to be designed with alternating layers of insulator/conductor material (fiberglass/tinfoil/epoxy?) so that they can help store energy but also coated with a fuzzy electrostatic accumulator for regenerative air braking. solved.
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"The point to remember is that limitations imposed by theoretical physicists are tentative at best."
The problem with your story is that the limitations of capacitor size was not constrained by theoretical physicists but by available material tech.
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The point to remember is that limitations imposed by theoretical physicists are tentative at best. Remember, physics without empirical evidence isn't science and isn't necessarily reflective of reality
The example you gave is not theoretical physics, it was based on empirical evidence available at the time. There was no theoretical reason one could not have a 1 farad capacitor that smaller than the empire state building. There was just no material known at the time capable of storing that much capacitance.
Re:This does not scale well (Score:5, Informative)
Initially the Wrights used a weight-driven catapult
wireless power transmission (Score:4, Interesting)
I do believe this is a solution begging for a problem, but I would not say there are hard limits on this application due to batteries in the distant future. We have to extrapolate from current technology that the future will offer wireless power transmission systems. Consider a matrix of ground-based microwave transmitters drawing from solar power that can beam energy to an aircraft such as this in bursts that can charge a meager capacitor. The aircraft is catapult launched, so it only needs to maintain enough energy on board for travelling between energy nodes within the matrix. Actual propulsion would be more efficiently accomplished via traditional means (propeller) for such an aircraft, but my intention here is to highlight that battery scalability should not suppress our freedom to dream of electric aircraft.
Re:This does not scale well (Score:4, Interesting)
Electric planes are coming, prototypes already exist. Your belief that batteries will stay insufficient for practical payload and range is not widely shared.
The problem is precisely that the "engines" are not powerful enough yet, measured by thrust per area. It is unclear whether that is fixable, but there is certainly hope.
Re:This does not scale well (Score:5, Interesting)
Electric planes are already here [wikipedia.org], but they're extremely limited by battery tech.
Since planes are weight-limited, their range is proportional to the specific energy (energy per unit mass) of the battery. That value would need to double before electric planes can be practically used for training. To fly a typical short-haul route, the batteries would need 3-4 times the specific energy. To fly long-haul, they would need 10-12 times. Now that's just considering whether they're able to do it, not whether it would be economical.
I grant you that there are a number of battery chemistries that would be able to accomplish this in theory, but it might be extremely difficult to implement in practice. I mean fusion has been theoretically possible for almost a century and it's still 15 years away according to its proponents.
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A 3-4 times multiple doesn't sound that bad, considering density achievements so far. Maybe it can be made better with solar cells all over the top of the fuselage and wings, solar input is predictable for most of the flight duration. A large fraction of commercial airline CO2 emission is incurred by short-haul flights. Of course, by the time it's feasible and economical, we all drive affordable electric cars with a range of over 1000km.
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Of course, by the time it's feasible and economical, we all ride in affordable self-driving electric cars with a range of over 1000km.
FTFY
Self-driving makes long-distance road travel much more appealing. I live in northern Utah, but have reason to regularly visit Boulder, Colorado. The flight takes an hour and fifteen minutes... but I actually have to leave home 90 minutes before the flight so I can drive to the airport, park and get through security in time, and it takes another hour (sometimes more) to rent a car and get from DEN to Boulder. So, total travel time is about four hours. The return is a bit worse. That's clearly bett
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Obviously this could also be done via rail service, if functional long-distance passenger rail existed in the US.
And just coincidentally started at a terminal near your home and ended at a terminal near your destination.
Re:This does not scale well (Score:4, Insightful)
A self-driving car which you nap in also can go slower in many cases, since it drives all night. Therefore it can chase energy efficiency, slowing down more up the grades for example. I don't care if I only go 25 MPH up a mountain if I'm snoring anyway. Plus, that makes the curves less violent, and helps me sleep. The vehicle can be programmed to use all the turnouts to let drivers by, and it will know where they are in advance as well so it won't miss any of them.
On the other hand, a train can do the same thing, and probably makes more sense for most long trips. Bring back rail.
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I think you're stretching your argument a fair bit (how? a random point out of many: you don't consider that by the time the 3-4x battery density becomes available _and_ economical for commercial flights, maybe solar coating will develop in the meantime and add negligible cost and weight, while their efficiency may go up in the decades of timeframe we talk about) just in order to shove in a personal insult at a random person, who didn't claim to have a clue to begin with. So, whatever personal plight you're
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I opt not to call you clueless for either or all of 1. thinking that a 2-3x battery density will happen in a couple of years, 2. you assuming that solar specs and costs will stay standstill over decades; 3. ignoring that commercial flights in some decades may in some part describe the type of traffic you talk about, incl. unmanned planes (commercial =/= passenger)
Exactly. I've been in many discussions with people who look at technical issues with a uni-variant outlook. We see it in here a lot, people who only look at one aspect. Solar/Wind power is a big example, and related to this story and the reactions of some. With wind power, people speak of the wind dying down - which ignores that there are areas where it essentially never does, like the Allegheny front. Even if so, along with the advances in the wind turbines, there are advances in battery storage. Same goes
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Well, this plane [theatlantic.com] flew around the world on just solar cells. Granted, it's more akin to the unmanned gliders you mentioned above but it was manned and flew a lot of miles on just solar power. Solar panels certainly aren't going to totally power an aircraft that carries a lot of passengers or freight but if they add to the range it might make sense to include them.
Re:This does not scale well (Score:5, Interesting)
Where can this SS tech go? Batteries will get lighter, but no where near enough to give this plane a practical payload or range.
What if we attach this engine to a big Zeppelin?
Re: This does not scale well (Score:2)
Where can this SS tech go?
Clearly it won't be suitable for fixed-wing applications for some time, if ever, but it looks like extremely promising tech for pushing giant hybrid air vehicles.
Re: This does not scale well (Score:2)
I hope youre joking... How many grams of mass do you think 3.6kj of energy (rough guess) is going to add to that battery?
Wonder how much thrust it's producing (Score:3)
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.
Re:Wonder how much thrust it's producing (Score:5, Informative)
silently floating around the world? (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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I forgot to ask, how well would this work in the rain? Or even fog for that matter.
Re: silently floating around the world? (Score:2)
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.
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Blimpin' ain't easy...
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The obvious problem with hydrogen is that it will leak. Just look at how difficult hydrogen is to store and transport. Even if you covered the Zeppelin with a layer of light metal (Al), the hydrogen would still eventually make its way out. Leaking normally would not be a problem - it just goes up. But if the leak is large enough and there is an ignition source, like lightning, then you have a problem. There would not be an explosion right away but a fire would compromise the structural integrity which
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A modern airship using Hydrogen would be orders of magnitude safer then the Hindenburg. That being said, still not safe enough. Just use helium and deal with the reduced efficiency.
Weird. It's almost as if you believe that helium is cheap and unlimited.
You know that no ship is watertight, right? It's much easier to pump out a bit of water once a day than it is to get a perfect seal.
Blimps could do the same thing, ie. have some tanks of hydrogen on board to keep themselves topped up when some escapes.
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Blimps could do the same thing, ie. have some tanks of hydrogen on board to keep themselves topped up when some escapes.
Ideally you'd skip the hydrogen storage and instead include a fuel cell and an air compressor. The top of the blimp you're imagining is covered in nanosolar, right?
Did they name the plane "Sharper Image?" (Score:4, Funny)
Because their air cleaners were the first thing I thought of.
Re: Did they name the plane "Sharper Image?" (Score:2, Interesting)
Which is also why this plane won't be pollution free at all. It will generate both ozone and nitric oxide.
Covering the negative electrode with catalytic material might help to break it down, no idea how much would be generated or scrubbed though.
Neat (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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I can. Solar powered, near maintenance free, silent drones.
Just up there forever, hovering, watching, doing gods know what.
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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)
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
Re:I'm no MIT student, (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.)
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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.
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The Hunt for Red October (Score:4, Funny)
"The order is: engage the silent drive." --Captain Marko Ramius
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Scare the sh*t out of you... (Score:3)
...your hair would stand on end...
Why are they calling this thing a "plane"? (Score:2)
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.
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How does it scale with density (Score:3)
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.
*One moving part (Score:3)
Fixed that for ya'.
What about terrestrial uses? (Score:2)
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.
I LOVE this! (Score:2)
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
Solid state windmill? (Score:3)
Re:First solid state plane my ass (Score:4, Funny)
Is it a hint on how you use toilet paper?
Re:First solid state plane my ass (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, but you are not supposed to notice the moving parts in the catapult that launched it ;)
And anyway, its far from the first.
A water rocket has 'no moving parts' in the same way, and in summer thousands of them get launched by children daily...
And they dont need a catapult or a perfectly still air environment.
So no, hardly the first.
Re: First solid state plane my ass (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not really the same. The water is in the plane on launch.
In this plane the ions are generated from the air, there is no loss of mass, so nothing "moving" off the plane (just energy)
Re: First solid state plane my ass (Score:2)
In this plane the ions are generated from the air, there is no loss of mass, so nothing "moving" off the plane
That's not actually a good thing. Ideally you want your plane to weigh less on landing than on takeoff. Makes things easier on brakes, tires, suspension, etc.
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Well, the on-board batteries will have less energy in them, so there's that.
Re: First solid state plane my ass (Score:3)
Right, because weighing less on take off (no fuel) is somehow worse..
You always need fuel. In this case your fuel is electricity stored in batteries. Not sure if you're aware, but I hear those tend to weigh a fair bit. You could in theory use fuel cells and compressed or liquid hydrogen instead of, but I'm not sure that would get you much in the way of weight reduction either. So in either scenario you'll have to seriously beef up your landing gear and brakes, which means added weight, which further reduces efficieny and/or max payload.
You want to minimize wear and tear on landing.. Not on takeoff AND landing.
Yes, that's what I said. By draggi
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What causes the mass to be expelled, if it isn't this electrostatic mechanism? You have to pump fuel into them, if nothing else; gravity feed doesn't work when the operating principle of the engine is to create pressure in the combustion chamber to push the burned fuel (or some other mass) out the back.
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The fuel could probably be coaxed into the combustion chamber by a combination of pressure differentials (carburetor-style, or working with the much higher intake airspeed) and gravity. There are motorcycles and even some cars that don't need a fuel pump.
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No moving parts is easy if we include sail boats. For flying things we also have blimps.
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ehm no. the article mentions pulse jets for example, click on them, and the article about pulsejets mentions how they can be made with few or even no moving parts.
Re: Takes humans into another dimension (Score:2)
I was pondering what 600 watts at 40,000 volts would be like when it meets a flock of geese.
Re: Takes humans into another dimension (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Takes humans into another dimension (Score:2)
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Yes, for low power apps; but not to propel an airplane.
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Re: A Lifter? (Score:2)
Re: A Lifter? (Score:2)
Re: I had one these too (Score:2)
Fucking millennials.
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Not sure how many batteries you'd need to stack up to get 40,000 volts, but I have a hunch the result will be quite a bit heavier than the voltage converter used here.